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Scottish Election 2021: Key results hour by hour as SNP fall just one short of majority

Track the election results with our charts
Track the election results with our charts

The votes have been counted and seats have been called.

It’s not quite the resounding victory the SNP were hoping for but it will be returning to the Scottish Parliament with a total of 64 seats –  one additional seat than they earned in the 2016 election.

This was not the usual overnight frenzy – it was a much more drawn out two-day affair and we were tracking all of the results as they happened.

The count opened at 9am on Friday and as you would expect, not much happened for the first few hours.

The first results came in some time after noon, with Orkney being the first constituency to call its result.

It took around four hours from the first result until we saw a seat flip. East Lothian was won by Labour in 2016 but flipped to SNP in this election.

However, it was the first of only a handful of seats to change hands. The map below shows the constituencies that flipped in the 2021 election.

As the counts closed on Friday evening, 48 of the 129 seats available had been called. The counting restarted on Saturday at 9am and it took around two hours for the first result to be called.

Results began to steadily trickle in throughout the afternoon, with the last constituency votes being tallied into the early evening.

The final constituency to be declared was Edinburgh Northern and Leith – turning in a final result just after 6pm.

You can see the full constituency results in our map below.

Once all of the constituency votes were declared the regional list declarations started to come in. Central Scotland was the first region to declare, with the Highland and Islands region very close behind.

Each region in Scotland returns an additional seven MSPs. The results of each area are shown in our grid below.

The final result was declared just before 9pm on Saturday.  The full final seat count can be seen in the parliament chart below.


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