The Scottish Executive is organising a series of trials on the electronic counting of votes in an election. The first trial will last for a week and be followed by similar trials in Aberdeen and Edinburgh.
The Scottish Executive and the Scottish Office are running the trials to evaluate the potential for e-Counting in the combined Scottish Parliament and local government elections of 2007. It is the first time they have been run on a national basis; the precedent in Scotland is limited to a form of e-Counting used in a council by-election in Aberdeen in 2004. The count will include scanning papers and the calculation of a result using the first past the post, additional member system and single transferable vote electoral systems.