FFS explains: Scottish Greens, Independent Green Voice and the lost MSPs

On 23 March 2021, the party registered a new logo with the Electoral Commission that consists of an image of a leaf and the words Independent Green Voice in capital letters.

It is difficult to draw any conclusions about IGV’s performance in the South of Scotland as the party had not fielded candidates in the region before.

Support for the Scottish Greens increased in both the South of Scotland and Glasgow between 2016 and 2021. In 2016, the party received 14,773 votes in the South of Scotland and in 2021 that had risen to 18,964.

In the three regions where IGV did not stand on the regional list – Highlands and Islands, Lothian and Mid Scotland & Fife – the average increase in vote share for the Scottish Greens since 2016 was 1.5 points.

The party won a total of eight seats at the 2021 election, all of them via the regional list.

As the SNP won all eight Glasgow seats, its number of regional votes was initially reduced from 133,917 to 14,879.

Applying the formula again, this time dividing Labour’s vote by two because it won the first list seat, gave Labour another seat.

As the Greens started out with 36,114 regional votes and the Conservatives started with 37,027, the Greens would have beaten the Tories to the final seat had they received just over 900 additional votes.

Ferret Fact Service is a non-partisan fact checker, and a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network fact-checkers’ code of principles.

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