Guidance for Returning Officers administering a Senedd election

You should undertake careful and thorough checks for all draft proofs of your election materials before they are signed off and ready to be printed and dispatched. This is often a time-consuming and time-critical stage of the process as your suppliers will be working to tight timetables and hard deadlines.

You should decide who from your team will be involved in the quality assurance of the production process. You may need a number of team members to play a role, and involving some not as close to the raw candidate information or base proofs to ensure that nothing has been missed might be helpful.

Where possible, more than one person should check each set of proofs before approving them to ensure that errors are spotted. This can mitigate the risk of errors when turning around a large number of proofs in a short timeframe.

You should discuss with your suppliers the most efficient way that checks can be carried out, to ensure that the quality assurance processes have been completed to your satisfaction. This may involve checking materials in person, by attending the premises of your supplier, or using technology to carry out checks remotely. 

You may wish to use a combination of these approaches to prevent any delays with voter materials being issued and dispatched. 

Some suppliers may conduct these checks for you as part of their service instead.

Where you are using suppliers to conduct checks, you must ensure that you get a detailed breakdown of what print quality checks are being undertaken.

These should include:

• checking that the printed material is accurate by checking against a specimen copy of the final signed off live proof for each version of the material
• where necessary, checking that all personalised text has been printed correctly

Alternatively, you may have materials sent to you for checking before they are dispatched from your premises.

You should produce guidance notes for those members of staff checking election materials.

Checking base text

Check the base text of all material carefully; this is the text that will not change, regardless of contest, number or details of candidates, or elector information.
 
For efficiency, suppliers may produce your proofs from templates used for previous polls. 

Checking live proofs

You should check live proofs of all forms of election material at the print stage to check that there are no errors and that they are being printed to the required specification.

Do not presume that the information output by your electoral software management system will automatically be correct. For example, there may have been legislative or boundary changes, or changes to your contact information. You should check that all the information is accurate and also that the election materials comply with all legislative requirements.

Checks should include items that have smaller print runs too, such as tendered ballot papers, postal proxies, or additional postal vote print runs the initial data files were provided.

You need to decide how many items will be checked for each item/print-run/fill. For print checks, at least the first and last item for each version of the item should be checked to ensure that the print runs start and end as expected.

Checks of live proof stage will allow staff to check that the print run reflects the latest approved and highlight if any of the signed-off proofs have been inadvertently altered and ensure that there is no bleeding of ink and that the print quality is consistently good.

You are likely to have many different sets of proofs for the same item. You should check the variable text on each set of proofs is correct. It is helpful to have a spreadsheet of all the variable text per version to check against. You should proof any spreadsheets against original data, such as nomination papers. This could include:

• a list of all of your contested elections
• the number of vacancies per election
• candidate names, address or relevant area information, descriptions and emblems

It is important to pay particular attention to emblems as many may look similar.

You should keep an audit trail of the checks that have been undertaken, which you can refer back to should any issues subsequently arise.