How to understand the voting information

The Returning Officer has made voting information from the Aberdeenshire Council Elections available to anyone who wishes to find out more about how voters ranked the candidates in order of preference.

The first line of the report shows how many candidates there were and how many councillors were to be elected. The subsequent lines begin with the number of voters who ranked the candidates in the same order. There then follows the order that those voters used. For example, the row in bold below shows that 71 voters gave their first preference to the candidate who appeared first on the ballot paper, and their second preference to the candidate who appeared second. The names of the candidates in the order they appeared on the ballot paper is given at the end of the report.
The figure ‘0’ means that there were no more preferences given to any candidate by voters who used this sequence. The final ‘0’ on the last line shows that the report has finished, and no more sequences were used.

71   1     2     0

If you have any questions about these reports, please contact our Election office.

Preference by Ballot Box

Rule 61 of the Scottish Local Election Rules requires that in a contested election where the count is conducted by means of an electronic counting system, the Returning Officer must within one week of the declaration of the result of the poll, give public notice of the number of first and subsequent preferences for each candidate cast at each polling station.
Where less than 200 votes were cast at a polling station, the Returning Officer must aggregate that information with information from one or more polling stations in the same ward.

View the methodology for combining batches of less than 200 votes (PDF 33KB).

In releasing the data, the Returning Officer is making it freely available for public use. It is not subject to copyright and material may be re-used provided that it is acknowledged, not used in a misleading way and is reproduced accurately. The Returning Officer does not accept responsibility for any alteration or manipulation of the data once released.

Contact us

For more information please contact our Election team.