Guidance for Returning Officers administering a Senedd election

These are some of the key factors you will need to consider in deciding how to organise and manage the verification and counting of the votes in your constituency: 

Consistency of approach: Local authorities and their staff who you may have appointed as deputies will have past experience of running election counts in their area and will have their own processes and workflows that they are used to following. While this knowledge and experience will be useful in helping to decide how best to organise and manage the verification and count, you should consider how you will ensure consistency in the approach to verification and count across the constituency, regardless of where the processes are to be carried out.

Staff resources and availability: The identification, recruitment and training of sufficient numbers of capable staff to conduct the count will also be a key consideration. For example, depending on the geography of the constituency, it may be more difficult to recruit the necessary numbers of suitable staff to work in a central location than it would be to recruit people to work at a venue closer to their home, who may also be experienced staff who have worked on election counts in the past.

Deployment of staff: You should also consider how to make the most efficient use of staff. If count staff are in one central location they can be deployed flexibly to maximise productivity in the interests of a timely outcome to the count. If staff are at separate local count centres it is likely that count staff in some areas may have completed the process while others are still counting. You will need to consider how to ensure that the count arrangements enable all constituent local authority areas to complete their counting within a reasonable time of each other.

Venues: Any venues used will need to be of a sufficient size and capacity to accommodate the necessary processes and staff and enable processes to be carried out effectively and in clear view of those entitled to attend, taking into account potential media attendance at the declaration of the result. Other local authorities within your constituency will already have venues (and reserve venues) that they have used in the past and are familiar with, along with the verification and count workflows and layouts that work for those venues. If you are using a central venue, the scale of the space needed will depend on the size(s) of the constituency and number of electors. You will also need to identify and put in place contingency arrangements, which may include identifying suitable venues of an equivalent size and capacity in case of the loss of a venue.

Transmission of local totals: Appointed deputies will need to transmit local totals to the RO to enable the constituency result to be calculated. You will need to ensure that you provide instructions on the method to be used for transmitting the information accurately and securely and carry out a test of the process in advance. There are greater risks with this process if counting is carried out locally, for example, as a result of technical issues. You will need to develop contingency arrangements to be deployed in the event of technical problems occurring.

Security and logistics: You should ensure that ballot papers are stored securely at all times. This will be an important consideration in any proposals that would require ballot boxes to be transported to a central venue, or between venues after being verified. You should consider carefully the potential security risks associated with the transportation of ballot boxes and the associated logistical challenges, including how to ensure that, where polls are combined, the correct ballot papers for each poll are in the right place so that all ballot papers can be included in the appropriate count.

Your decisions as to when, where and how the votes are to be verified and counted should be taken in accordance with the principles and considerations set out in this guidance. Once you have made your decisions you should consider how best to ensure that plans for managing and resourcing verification and counting processes will achieve these principles in practice.

Decision-making

You should keep a record of all steps taken in order to be able to provide an audit trail demonstrating your decision-making process. You should be able to explain your decisions, and you should be prepared to do so in response to enquiries.

To help build confidence in your plan for the verification and count, you should share information and consult and engage on your plan with stakeholders. You should communicate throughout your planning process and be prepared to explain the reasons for the decisions you are taking. For key decisions, you should provide your reasons to stakeholders in writing.

You should also identify in advance those decisions about the management of the count that must be taken in consultation and agreement with parties, individual candidates and agents, and make clear to them on what basis you will be making decisions. This includes, for example, decisions on re-counts and the suspension of the count. While you should seek input from those affected to inform your decision-making, ultimately the responsibility for making decisions remains with you as RO. You will need to decide the best way to communicate these decisions once taken.

Documentation

You should produce templates for all the documents to be used at the verification and count in advance and ensure staff are familiar with them. Colour coding the documentation can be an effective way of quickly locating the relevant documents.

Equipment and set up

You will need to decide what equipment you will require to administer the verification and count (as appropriate) and to communicate with the candidates and agents and anybody else attending the count, including:

• public announcement systems
• phone lines
• mobile phones and mobile signals
• general IT equipment and spreadsheets for recording verification and count figures
• equipment for verifying the personal identifiers on returned postal votes (if the final opening of postal votes is to take place at the verification venue)
• screens for displaying any relevant information throughout the count

We have prepared a checklist to help relevant staff ensure that all materials, including stationery and equipment required at the verification and count venue are present.

You can find this checklist in the verification and count section of the resources page.

We have also developed guidance to support you should you need to procure any equipment.