2007 Scottish local elections

The 2007 Scottish local elections were held on 3 May 2007, the same day as Scottish Parliament elections and local elections in parts of England. All 32 Scottish councils had all their seats up for election – all Scottish councils are unitary authorities.

New electoral system

This was the first election for local government in Great Britain to use the Single Transferable Vote, as implemented by the Local Governance (Scotland) Act 2004. Under the Act, council seats were allocated in ward contests of one, two, three, four or five seats in each. The voter had the right to mark as many or as few preferences as desired.
All in all, 1222 seats were filled using more than 350 separate wards.
The use of Scotland's new electoral system resulted in most councils being under no overall control, a situation in which no single political group achieves a majority of seats.

eCounting fiasco

Scanners supplied by DRS Data Services Limited of Milton Keynes, in partnership with Electoral Reform Services, the trading arm of the Electoral Reform Society, were used to electronically count the paper ballots in both the Scottish council elections and the Scottish Parliament general election.
Because of the fiasco in 2007 of holding parliamentary and local elections simultaneously, the following Scottish local elections were held in 2012 instead of 2011.

Party performance

The Labour party lost control of all but two of its councils, Glasgow and North Lanarkshire, but received the largest number of votes, while the SNP were the main beneficiaries of the new voting system, picking up over 180 new seats. The Scottish Greens elected their first-ever councillors, winning eight seats.

Results

Councils

The notional results in the following table are based on a document that John Curtice and Stephen Herbert produced on 3 June 2005, calculating the effect of the introduction of the Single Transferable Vote on the 2003 Scottish local elections.