Is the SNP gerrymandering their leadership vote?

[Shelefttheweb]

It seems the HQ are refusing to say how many members are allowed to vote or allow independent scrutiny of the vote. They want to wait until after the vote to see how many votes they need to add to make Yousaf win to announce how many qualifying members there are. It is outrageous that the vote for the person likely to be FM is being done this way.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64972800

So if there is a less than 6000 difference between candidates?

Part of the discrepancy will be down to the elapsed time between the data dump they handed to Mi-Voice and the current running total. It will not account for all of it, and certainly not the alleged 6000 discrepancy, but it's inevitable under the circumstances.

SNP fees are variable and at the discretion of each individual member, so it isn't as straightforward as shed one member = shed set £ income.

You think nearly 6000 members cancelled their membership after the leadership election was announced?

If this is aimed at me, then no. I have already said it doesn't account for a 6000 discrepancy.

Is it likely that any members cancelled their membership after NS announced she would resign?

Unless, of course, the data dump handed to Mi-Voice is yonks out of date, which honestly wouldn't be that much of a surprise.

But surely - and I am not an expert on these things - you say "the people eligible to vote are the people registered as members at 23.59 on X date". Then after that time, you hit the button to send the file to the mailing company for the ballots, and the independent auditors or whoever.

Well yes, you would think that it would be that straightforward, hence why such a discrepancy is odd and even I'm questioning it, but that's still a million miles away from it being some sort of evidence of an attempt at rigging an outcome, especially when the claims being made hinge on people being denied a vote, not an excess of votes from people who likely should not be eligible.

I think they now have to adequately explain this, and unless they can resolve it satisfactorily then I'd expect the ultimate result to be challenged unless it's clear that a few thousand votes would not have altered the outcome.

As far as I am aware - happy to be proven wrong too - the 78,000 was never a definite number but instead an estimate so it may be that there's not a discrepancy outside of normal membership list error margins.

The "outsider" candidates aren't claiming that there's 6,000 extra ballots right now, they're saying the decline in membership is a sign things need to change.

As far as I am aware - happy to be proven wrong too - the 78,000 was never a definite number but instead an estimate

That's my understanding of it. Seems Ash Regan is also using the estimate as the basis for her claim of a drop in membership since October 2022, since there was no official figure circulated at that time that she can base this upon.

Ha ha! This is hilarious and shows really how awful the SNP are. I was reprimanded on a thread last month after I said membership was down and told there was 100k members of the SNP!

language used by Mike Russell saying this fighting is giving fuel to ‘our enemies’ demonstrates how those not in the cult are seen.

I hope they implode.

and this is on top of MSP Emma Harper somehow accessing the membership list of south Scotland and sending them all two emails supporting Humza Yousef.

Mostly they are probably too embarrassed to admit how many members they have lost.

But its not a good look to have the predecessors husband running the election and most of the infrastructure backing one candidate over the other two.

This is who the SNP are and this is how they run the country. They need some time in opposition.

But they didn't need to make the number of voters PUBLIC. They just needed to make sure the candidates saw it was being done fairly, and the auditing company needed to be able to check that number of voting papers = number of voters.

Did Humza yousef really just ask a group of Ukrainian refugees, ‘where are all the men?’

if this was a Westminster party in power…

Let’s hope Humza hasn’t got 80,000 votes😂

Who funds Mi Voice?

Ooft 10,000 members lost in the first 3 months of 2023. Wonder what happened at the end of 2022 that might have caused that? 🤔

Yeah, why would the Scottish public need to know about the election of the Scottish Government’s first minister?

Look I am far from a SNP fan as can be. But exact numbers isn’t really a huge issue as long as the election is fair.

I think it does matter. It’s misleading propaganda when they trott out how buoyant their membership is and this justifies independence and the people are happy with them.

Especially too when SNP protested against the Conservative Party leader contest and how they a tiny minority were effectively electing prime minister. This is exactly what’s happening in Scotland now.

It also matters hugely to Ash and Kate when Humza is being promoted as a continuity candidate if it is continuity of policies that result in the party losing members hand over fist. It is very relevant information for their campaigns which has been withheld from them.

I’m shocked after the amateurish way the SNP have governed to the detriment
of economy, education and health that they actually have 720000 plus members - just shows how good the Nationalist movement is at brainwashing . . It’s an ugly movement but
they will make sure the continuity candidate gets in so that is manipulation of a sort only more subtle.

annabelindajane, you have got an extra zero in there! The SNP only have 72,000 members, not 720,000. They never had that many even at their peak and numbers have been plummeting since their farcical gender bill and attempts to put male rapists in women’s prisons.

According to the SNP CEO Twitter page, the day NS took office, 14th November 2004,
membership stood at 85,272

numbers have been plummeting since their farcical gender bill and attempts to put male rapists in women’s prisons

There has been no official SNP membership count since 2021, so you have no credible basis for making this claim, but you never let facts get in the way of one of your bizarre, obsessive anti-SNP rants any other time, so it shouldn't be surprising this is no different.

All that is known is that estimated numbers were 78000 approx in Summer of 2022, and since the GRR bill has been a matter of policy since 2016, if it was really such a back-breaking issue for the SNP as you contend I would not have expected the periodic increases in numbers at various points since then.

What I also find interesting is that you are never slow to rant about 'the SNP' putting male bodied people in female prison estate despite this being a matter that is handled entirely by SPS, yet seem to be oblivious to the fact that your beloved Tories only put a stop to the same thing in England the week before it was stopped in Scotland. Perhaps you are not oblivious, and just choose to ignore that through convenience. Anyway, it's only one more example of your raging blinkered hypocrisy.

Only yesterday you yet again brought up the 'missing' 600k as if there is some sort of law which prevents a political party spending its own money, yet you repeatedly advocate for and implore MN users to vote Conservative, a party stuffed full of people who have helped themselves to billions from the public purse, a party that is awash with large donations from extremely dubious sources, a party that ignores procurement law in order to filch funds from the public purse and divert them into the accounts of entirely hypothetical businesses owned by their buddies.

Only yesterday you were griping about 'ferries', a disgraceful fiasco in its own right, and opining that the money this has cost would have paid for such and such, yet I've never once seen you mention the absolute farce of the Ajax AFV program which is not only far further behind schedule that the Scottish ferry shenanigans, the cost of it has also ballooned to something that makes the ferries farce look like chickenfeed, again, an absolute disgrace and entirely overseen by your Tory party.

Perhaps if you are so concerned with cost to the public purse that you are actually advocating dispensing with Holyrood because it costs 600million per year to operate, you could instead ask your former Conservative PM to offset that against a portion of the extra 350million pounds PER WEEK we are presumably ploughing into the NHS since we left the EU? Or is that being used to build the dozens of extra hospitals he promised?

There are dozens of absolutely legitimate criticisms to be made of the SNP, but you continually choose examples for which there are even more egregious Tory equivalents, and still unashamedly advocate voting Conservative. Again, you are nothing but a raging hypocrite.