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Guidance for candidates and agents


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Elections will be held on 1 May 2025 for all Cornwall Council, town and parish council seats. More information is available on our 2025 elections page.

Nomination pack for candidates

If you wish to be a candidate at an election, please contact us as soon as possible to request a nomination pack: 

The pack will contain the required nomination forms and guidance on the election process. 

The election timetable will begin when the Notice of Election is published. Candidates must return their completed nomination papers by hand and by the deadline to the place stated in the Notice of Election.

Guidance for candidates and agents

Cornwall Council and all parish and town councils are due for elections in May 2025. For more information, please go to our 2025 Cornwall Council and parish/town council elections page.

Information on the role of a Cornwall Councillor is available on our Be A Councillor page.

Please use the links below to important information on standing for election:

Withdrawal of nominations

Withdrawal of nominations closes at the same time as receipt of nominations. 

If you are nominated in more than one division or parish/town (or ward of a parish/town) for elections on the same day for the same council, you must withdraw from all areas but one before the withdrawal of nominations deadline.

If you do not withdraw from all but one area, you will be deemed to have withdrawn from all areas and you will no longer be a candidate.

Election campaigning expense limits

Different expenses rules apply for different types of election. The above guidance for candidates includes full details on candidate's spending. 

For the latest expenses limit details for a current election, please contact our Electoral Services team. Our contact details are at the bottom of this page.

After the election, candidates must submit a return of their expenses incurred. If no expenses were incurred, candidates must submit forms saying "nil. This return is to check that expenditure is within the authorised limit.

Candidates are not entitled to any refund of such expenses from the Council.

Electoral boundaries

Parliamentary constituency boundaries changed at the Parliamentary general election on 4 July 2024.

As a result, some polling district codes changed on the electoral register from December 2024.

Please go to our pages for the 2023 Review of Parliamentary Constituencies for more information.

For Cornwall Council elections, there are 87 divisions, each electing one councillor. Some changes to parish/town council boundaries were also made to facilitate these new divisions at the May 2021 elections.

Some minor boundary changes will take effect at the May 2025 elections. These changes are a result of deferred proposals from the Community Governance Review completed in 2023.

They have been confirmed by statutory order. 

Details of the changes are in these notices:

If you are not sure which area you wish to stand in, please view our interactive map of electoral boundaries.

Use the “Map Layers” tool to tick the box next to the “Government boundaries” group and the “Electoral divisions” layer within it to make it visible.

Use the plus + and minus - buttons to left to zoom in and out. You can drag the map to the area of interest to display the relevant boundaries on the map.

You can also add or remove layers of different boundaries using the “Map Layers” tool, Government boundaries group from the top right of the screen.

Need help?

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