People in Scotland have begun voting on whether the country should stay in the UK or become an independent nation.<\/p>\n
Voters will answer “Yes” or “No” to the referendum question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?”<\/p>\n
With 4,285,323 people – 97% of the electorate – registered to vote, a historically high turnout is expected.<\/p>\n
Votes will be cast at 2,608 polling places across the country until 22:00 on Thursday. The result is expected early on Friday morning.<\/p>\n
Ballot papers will be counted in each of Scotland’s 32 local authority areas.<\/p>\n
These will include votes cast from the 789,024 postal vote applications, which was the largest volume of registration for postal votes ever in Scotland.<\/p>\n
Result declaration<\/strong><\/p>\n After votes have been tallied, the counting officer in each area will communicate the result to the chief counting officer Mary Pitcaithly in Edinburgh.<\/p>\n With her approval they will then make a declaration of the result.<\/p>\n Once the results from all 32 local authority areas are known, Ms Pitcaithly will declare the result of the referendum at the Royal Highland Centre outside Edinburgh.<\/p>\n Ms Pitcaithly has said she will announce the result at “breakfast time” on Friday.<\/p>\n The result is most likely to be between 06:30 and 07:30, according to Elections Scotland.<\/p>\n That is because the final Scottish declarations in the 2010 UK parliamentary elections and the 2011 Scottish parliamentary elections declaration were made at those times respectively.<\/p>\n However, running totals – which can be made from the first declaration onwards – may indicate a result earlier in the morning.<\/p>\n The bulk of these are expected to come in between 03:00 and 06:00.<\/p>\n Local recounts<\/strong><\/p>\n Because of the expected high turnout, counting officers have put measures in place to reduce the risk of queuing at polling stations.<\/p>\n The remote nature of some Scottish regions also means bad weather could delay the receipt of ballot boxes at counting centres, in turn delaying the national result.<\/p>\n Helicopters and boats are being used to transport ballot boxes to counts in areas such as Argyll and Bute.<\/p>\n Elections Scotland said recounts will only be allowed at a local level on the basis of concerns about process, not the closeness of a result.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People in Scotland have begun voting on whether the country should stay in the UK or become an independent nation. Voters will answer “Yes” or “No” to the referendum question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” With 4,285,323 people – 97% of the electorate – registered to vote, a historically high turnout is expected. Votes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":48754,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-48753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/48754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}