Elections to the Scottish Parliament
Voting for the Scottish Parliament…   The electoral system in use at the Scottish Parliamentary elections is called the Additional Member System (or AMS). Each voter has two votes in the Scottish Parliament election: a constituency vote for a candidate and a regional vote for a political party or candidate standing as an individual.
There are 73 constituency seats in the Scottish Parliament, which are elected using the first past the post system, and there are 56 regional members who are elected using the party list system (which provides an element of proportional representation to reflect the voting preferences of the electorate in a more representative manner).

The Government have decided that the 2007 Scottish Parliament and local government elections will be counted electronically. Electors will mark their paper ballots by hand and on close of poll ballot papers will be electronically scanned, facilitating the production of results at these complex combined elections.

The Scottish Parliamentary elections will be counted overnight and will be declared before the local government results. Voters will see changes to the Scottish Parliament elections in May 2007, because of a new design of ballot paper. A colour-coded single page will replace the 2 separate ballot papers used in previous elections. The left-hand side of the ballot page will contain the list of parties standing for elections as regional MSPs; the right-hand side will contain the list of candidates standing as constituency MSPs. Each list will be a different colour so voters know when they mark their cross which type of MSP they are voting for.