You should consult with LROs in the police area early in the planning process about the production of ballot papers to enable them to confirm their requirements and printing arrangements with their suppliers at an early stage in the process.
Although the final content of the ballot paper cannot be confirmed until nominations have closed, in addition to confirming the colour, you will need to make decisions about the following elements of the ballot paper at an early stage:
ballot paper numbers
unique identifying mark
the ‘official mark’
You may use a different official mark for different purposes at the election.1
That means that you could choose one official mark for all ballot papers for the whole of the police area, or you could choose to have different official marks, e.g. for polling station ballot papers and ballot papers issued to postal voters.
In particular, you will need to consider how to ensure that no two ballot papers in the police area are duplicates. The unique identifying mark will need to be unique to each ballot paper across the police area. If you reach a decision that the unique identifying marks to be used across the police area are to be formed of a repeat of the ballot paper number with a prefix, you should consider developing unique prefixes for each voting area which would then give LROs flexibility as to how they number the ballot papers within their voting area.