Planning for the count: key information for media covering the Scottish Parliament election

Count timing and Scheduling of declarations

There will be no overnight counting on Thursday 6 May.

The Convener of the Electoral Management Board for Scotland (EMB), Malcolm Burr, has directed Returning Officers to begin the count between 9am and 10am on the morning of Friday 7 May.

You should expect all counts to take longer this year as in many cases there will be reduced staffing numbers to accommodate physical distancing.

The EMB has collated information from Returning Officers setting out which constituencies they intend to count/declare on Friday 7 May and which they intend to count on Saturday 8 May. It also includes details of count venues.

This information is available on the EMB website:  https://www.emb.scot/downloads/file/812/provisional-dates-for-declaration-in-each-constituency 

It is not possible to calculate and declare the regional result until the last constituency in each Region has declared.

Attendance at counts

The following people are entitled by law to attend the count:

• the relevant Returning Officer/ Regional Returning Officer and their staff
• candidates and one guest
• election agents
• counting agents
• Electoral Commission representatives
• accredited observers, and
• any other person permitted to attend by the Returning Officer

Each Returning Officer will need to make decisions on how best to control the number of people, at the verification and count based on the size of the count venue, and the impact of physical distancing measures in place.

Members of the media and photographers who want to attend or film at a count must contact the relevant Returning Officer to request permission in advance to attend the count and declaration of the results. You should contact the press team at the relevant council in the first instance.

Tracking election result information from the counts

Due to physical distancing measures it may not be possible to accommodate the usual number of media ‘stringers’ at the counts who attend in order to feed the results data back to their media outlet in real time.

In order that media can still access the results remotely, the communications teams at each count centre will tweet the officially declared results as soon as possible after local declarations using the hashtag #SPE21RESULT