THE polls are encouraging and remarkably steady! For once I’m not talking about opinion polls in Scotland, although who could miss yesterday’s latest survey showing yet another majority for independence, record support for the SNP and contrasting ratings for the Scottish Government (positive) and UK Government (negative).

With only days to go until the US presidential election the excitement is growing to see whether the national poll lead for Democratic nominee Joe Biden will be enough or whether Donald Trump will confound the pollsters for a second time and pluck victory from the jaws of defeat.

There is a good number of reasons to believe that the current US polls are more accurate than the last presidential election in 2016 and that the writing is on the wall for the Republicans. According to the RCP Average, Biden leads Trump by 7.4% and analysis by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has Biden leading in national and state polls – and Trump “needs a big polling error in his favor if he is going to win”. Of course that is exactly what happened in 2016.

However, pollsters say they have learnt their lessons, with state polls previously massively underestimating non-college-educated voters. They have since changed their methodology to take account of this in their weightings. A big change to circumstances 2016 is the absence of large numbers of undecided voters, who last time broke late and overwhelmingly for Trump.

In a major change to the last presidential race, this one has been without big surprises, and the polling lead has remained for Biden throughout. Analysis by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic points to the strength of the Democrats in district polling, which by this stage in 2016 was showing worrying signs for the Hillary Clinton campaign. On the other hand, there is a suspicion that there might be a “shy Trump supporter” effect skewing polls.

Regardless of the predictions, we do know that a record number of Americans have already cast their votes. According to the US Elections Project at the University of Florida this amounts to more than 80 million people, equating to 58% of the total 2016 turnout. The stage is set for the highest US participation rate in over a century.

With concerns about the impact of coronavirus, huge numbers of people have been voting by mail or at early in-person polling sites. President Trump has made repeated and unfounded allegations about postal voting fraud, perhaps because the take-up is higher amongst Democrats and he wants to question the result should the election be close enough.

We should count our lucky stars that electoral administration is not a partisan or contested issue in the same way here in Scotland. Postal voting is becoming an ever bigger part of our electoral process and is only likely to continue to grow.

According to analysis by the leading election experts Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher the proportion of electors in the UK with postal votes nearly quadrupled from 4% to 15% between 2001 and 2010. In Scotland this jumped to 17.6% in 2015, equating to 719,955 voters. With 86.6% of postal ballots being returned, this meant that 20.8% of votes actually cast in Scotland were postal votes.

Of the top 20 percentage point increase in % of electorate with postal votes from 2010-15, 14 of the top 20 constituencies in Great Britain were in Scotland. Orkney and Shetland was in the lead in Scotland, followed by Na h-Eileanan an Iar; Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross; Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey; Ross, Skye and Lochaber; Perth and North Perthshire; Glasgow South West; Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale ad Tweeddale; Glasgow Central; Banff and Buchan; Ochil and South Perthshire; Aberdeenshire West and Kincardine; In 2016, the most recent Scottish Parliament elections saw 726,555 postal votes issued amounting to 17.7% of the total electorate. Nearly 77% were returned by electors and postal votes accounted for 23.7% of all votes included in the count for the constituency contests and 23.8% of all votes included in the count for the regional contests. The proportion of postal votes rejected or otherwise not included in the count amounts to little more than 3%. This is mostly because a signature or date of birth (or both) are mismatched or because the elector omitted to enclose either the ballot paper or the postal vote statement (or both).

With the continuing impact of the coronavirus pandemic, election planners will be thinking about the options for running next year’s Scottish parliamentary election in the safest possible way. I suspect an even higher take-up of postal voting will be encouraged, which would be entirely sensible. This is not as straight forward as it might sound for election administrators, but at least they won’t face the same partisan roadblocks and wrecking tactics we have seen in the United States.