Guidance for Returning Officers administering a Scottish Parliament election

If you are also the RRO, the same principles of transparency, accuracy, timeliness, integrity and communication set out in the planning for the verification and count should underpin the planning for and delivery of the results collation.

It is for you to determine how best to manage this process in your region. Your project plan should include plans to deliver the calculation of the result and the allocation of seats. Whatever processes and systems you use, you should ensure that they meet the principles for the verification and count.

You should decide on the process and mechanism you will use to collate constituency and regional results from CRO in order to calculate the regional result and carry out the allocation of seats. You should also consider what you may need to put in place to support these processes, including protocols, mechanisms and systems, and ensure that they are followed consistently and build contingencies into your plans in case any facility, building or technology that you intend to use becomes unavailable.

You should liaise with CROs in planning and developing the process for collating constituency and regional results, and provide them with guidance on how this will work in practice. You should produce and share in advance with CROs templates of all documents which you will require them to complete during the collation of results (whether electronically or in hard copy) to ensure that all information is recorded and transmitted in a consistent way and to provide a clear audit trail.

You should also make arrangements for testing the process and any supporting systems you intend to use, which should include at least one rehearsal of the process involving your staff and CROs and their staff in order to ensure that everyone involved understands and is familiar with how the process works and what their responsibilities are, and to enable any issues to be identified and resolved before the event itself.

The time it will take for all CROs in the region to complete their election counts will directly impact on the timing of the results collation. When developing your assumptions for the timing of the results collation you will need to consider relevant practical factors such as:

• the geography of the electoral region as a whole 
• the number of constituencies within the electoral region

You cannot start the allocation of regional seats until you have received both the constituency and regional results from all CROs in your region.

You should liaise with the CROs in your region to develop an estimate of their expected finishing times.

This information will feed into your planning assumptions about the timing of the allocation of regional seats and declaration of the regional result and will therefore help you to manage expectations of parties, candidates, agents and the media.

You should ensure that you have the appropriate resources in place to enable the results collation to be administered effectively, with the allocation of regional seats completed in a timely way once you have received the constituency and regional results from all CROs in your region.