Polling day is here.

But there’s more to today’s election than the fate of Kezia Dugdale.

In what by any standards has been a boring campaign, the media has focused (when not just pumping out its usual diet of SNPBAD) on the battles for 2nd and 4th places. But there could yet be a spectacular story leading the press 24 hours from now.

Despite all that’s been said, it’s by no means inconceivable that the SNP could lose their majority at this election. Five years of essentially unopposed government have caused a surprising number of people to forget just how difficult majorities in the Scottish Parliament are to achieve, by design. What was universally deemed to be impossible before the 2011 vote is now almost as universally deemed to be inevitable.

Nicola Sturgeon’s party currently nominally “holds” just 64 seats out of 129. When the Parliament dissolved a few weeks ago, the SNP in fact did NOT have a technical majority. (It retained one in practice only because the deceased independent MSP Margo Macdonald’s seat remained vacant. It will be filled today.)

The margin for error, then, is slim. To secure a majority on constituency seats alone the Nats need to GAIN a total of 12 that they don’t currently hold. Most would have to come from an ailing Labour Party that nevertheless looks like holding onto around 70% to 75% of its 2011 vote.

Of the constituency seats that were already SNP six weeks ago, 10 have majorities of under 1000 (the narrowest was won by just seven votes) and could be vulnerable to either Unionist tactical voting or Green candidates who didn’t stand in 2011 splitting the pro-independence vote and letting Labour or Tory candidates come through the middle to win.

(As happened in 2015 where 839 Green votes were enough to stop the SNP from ejecting David Mundell in Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, where he hung on by a majority of 798. A split pro-independence vote also allowed UKIP to sneak in and narrowly win a Scottish seat at the 2014 European election, giving David Coburn a voice on Scotland’s airwaves ever since.)

So let there be no doubt – despite a huge nationwide poll lead, there are at least 15 seats and perhaps more where the SNP face the prospect of a serious fight. That could leave them as many as 10 seats short of a majority, and if their supporters have chosen to indulge smaller parties with their regional vote, there’s no guarantee that the shortfall would be made up with list seats.

While the odds still favour another term of majority government for the Nats, it’s nowhere near the foregone conclusion that both the Unionist media and the ambitious smaller parties of the left have painted it as, for their own reasons.

That’s because the Scottish electoral system hates majority governments. It strives very hard to avoid them, and the SNP know that well, which is why they’ve spent as much time pushing the “#BothVotesSNP” message as the media and opposition parties have spent saying their majority is guaranteed.

If the party’s supporters are complacent or simply stay at home, they might yet wake up on Friday morning with a dreadful hangover.