Guidance for Returning Officers administering a Scottish Parliament election

Postal ballot packs must be issued as soon as it is practicable to do so after the deadline for the delivery of nomination papers.

There may be circumstances after the deadline for the delivery of nominations where a person you have already sent postal ballot papers to subsequently applies to the ERO to cancel their postal vote, or make any changes to their absent voting arrangements, within time for the changes to be able to take effect at the election.

However, a postal ballot paper that has already been returned to the CRO cannot be cancelled. For more information see our ERO guidance on changing or cancelling postal votes at an election.

You will need to arrange with the relevant EROs how you will liaise with them, so that any applications for changes to absent voting arrangements can be communicated in a timely manner so that you know which ballot papers need to be cancelled.

Upon notification from the ERO, you must immediately cancel any postal ballot papers that have been issued to such an elector or postal proxy, and add the details of the cancelled ballot papers to the list kept for that purpose.1 For more information see our guidance on record keeping for cancelled postal votes.

You should consider how to manage the process of removal of those packs from any postal vote batches not yet dispatched from your printer. 

Where the change to the absent voting arrangements relates only to the address to which the ballot papers should be sent, you must, in addition to cancelling the original postal ballot papers, issue a replacement postal ballot pack to the new address.2

You must also cancel any spoilt or lost postal ballot papers you have had to replace.3  

For more information see our guidance on re-issuing spoilt postal votes and lost/not received postal votes.

You need to maintain an audit trail of all the cancellations, your software system can be used to log all cancellations to enable you to produce the required list of cancelled postal ballot papers and identify any postal ballot papers that have been cancelled but have been returned and so need to be retrieved.