Local Electoral Administration and Registration Services (Scotland) Act 2006 Explanatory Notes

Section 5 Access to election documents

8.This section provides for access to election documents and gives Scottish Ministers a power to make regulations to impose conditions on that access and to charge for it.

9.Subsection (2) imposes requirements on the proper officer who holds documents for local government elections in Scotland to make them available for public inspection. The meaning of the term “proper officer” is set out in section 7 below. Subsection (3) identifies who can request copies of the register and the list of proxies marked to show who has been issued with a ballot paper in a polling station, and the marked lists of postal and postal proxy voters who returned their ballot papers.

10.Subsections (4) to (8) contain regulation-making powers and define what the regulations may or may not provide. The regulations may impose conditions on the inspection and supply of documents, how they are supplied and whether they are subject to payment of a fee, making copies of the documents, the purposes for which the information in the documents is to be used and the disclosure and supply of the documents to another person or use of the information for a different purpose than the one for which the documents were originally provided.

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