The Gould Report recommended today that Scottish Parliamentary and local elections should be held on different days in future because of the fiasco that took place in May when about 4% of the votes for the Parliament in Edinburgh were spoilt.

So long as different systems are used for the two elections and it was not within the review team’s terms of reference to recommend a change from that, holding the elections on different days is the only viable course, but it is not the best one. It would be far better to reduce voters' confusion by using the same system for both.

So which one? The Additional Member System (AMS) used for the Scottish Parliamentary elections or the Single Transferable Vote (STV) used for the local elections? Of course, you would expect us to recommend STV and you are right - but for very good reasons:

• AMS was the complicated system, requiring voters to vote twice, that caused problems, while there were very few spoilt STV votes.
• Unlike AMS, STV does not create two classes of representatives.
• People "not parties" choose their representatives with STV but not with AMS.