Running electoral registration - Scotland

We have produced a table that sets out the required information that must be included in the discrepancy notices. 

In addition to the prescribed content, you will need to provide clear information on:

• details of the discrepancy
• how to amend any absent voting arrangement in place 
• the qualifications required of a person being appointed as proxy (where appropriate), highlighting the differences between UK Parliament elections and Scottish Parliament and Local council elections requirements, explaining that a person appointed for both must be qualified for both. For more information see our guidance on the qualifications for acting as a proxy
• which absent voting arrangements would remain in place if they don’t make a fresh application

You should include a paper postal vote application form, and a pre-addressed, pre-paid reply envelope in which the application form can be returned. You should also include your relevant email or telephone contact information.

You should consider how to manage circumstances where upon receipt of a discrepancy notice, an elector determines they wish to change the information in their UK Parliament elections arrangement or update both their Scottish Parliament and Local council elections and UK Parliament elections arrangements instead. This will require signposting to the options for completion of a new UK Parliament elections application as well as, or instead of, updating their Scottish Parliament and Local council elections arrangement.

We have produced template discrepancy notices which you can find in the absent voting section of the resources page.

Date of birth discrepancies

During your preparations for the convergence process you may identify records for an individual where a date of birth identifier discrepancy exists between records which could impact on your ability to merge the absent voting records.

Your duty to maintain registers that are accurate and complete means that you have the power to take steps to try and resolve these discrepancies. This could be through contacting the electors or inspecting any relevant local data.

There is no prescribed process for dealing with date of birth discrepancies, but you should ensure that you confirm the data held with enough time to be able to action any changes prior to the relevant day. 

You are not required to write to the elector in these circumstances, if you have a phone number or email address, you could use this to ask for the information. You should ensure that, whatever method you choose, a clear audit trail is kept. 

If you are not satisfied the correct information is held and are unable to confirm the correct date of birth, the absent voting arrangements should be cancelled. You should then notify the elector and send information on how to reapply.

There is a template letter available for managing date of birth discrepancies in our template discrepancy notices which you can find in the absent voting section of our resources page.