SCOTTISH voters go to the polls on May 3 to elect the 129 members of the Scottish Parliament. On the same day, they will also elect 1222 councillors to serve on Scotland's councils.

Today, The Herald sets out an election guide to the Holyrood candidates and their battlegrounds, and explains the radical changes that can be expected in local government. This is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to the 2007 Scottish elections.

Scottish politics, which has been dominated by Labour, is facing the possibility of the biggest change for perhaps 50 years - at least according to the lead SNP enjoys over the Labour Party in most opinion polls.

As you can see from the following pages, the results in 2003 were won by very tight margins, and are being hard fought in door-to-door campaigning, leafleting, e-mail, text messaging, direct mail, some of it focused on issues for voters' individual streets, and hundreds of thousands of phones ringing from call centres.

That is where Labour and the SNP are fighting hardest. Labour cannot afford to continue losing seats as it did in 2003. But that was a bad year for the SNP, and it needs to push harder to dislodge Labour from its traditional heartlands.

The national narrative of "a two-horse race" is far from the reality of many local races. The Tories have a small number of seats they could hope to gain, with three they want to hold. The Labour and LibDem coalition parties are increasingly at electoral loggerheads. Whereas LibDems used to be Labour's country cousins, with few places where they competed over the same ground, LibDems are now challenging Labour in several parts of the country.

As our lists of nominations show today, the pattern of elections is changing beyond the main parties. The results four years ago taught two big lessons. One came from Strathkelvin and Bearsden, where Dr Jean Turner dislodged Labour over a local hospital issue.

Now, single-issue candidates, including more health campaigners, hope to repeat her success by challenging Labour in the constituencies it holds - around Monklands hospital in Lanarkshire, for instance. With opposition parties also highlighting local health issues, some of these candidates could split any anti-Labour vote on May 3.

The other lesson was taught by a combination of the Scottish Green Party and John Swinburne.

The Greens showed that if a party ignores the constituency vote and sends a clear message to voters on how to use their regional list vote, they can surpass even their own expectations.

Mr Swinburne, meanwhile, set up the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party a few weeks before the 2003 election, having reckoned there were thousands of pensioners' votes in Central Scotland. He believed that, while they would probably vote for one of the larger parties with their constituency choice, they would be willing to vote for their generation in the regional option. Boosted by publicity from a couple of Old Firm old-timers, he won a solitary seat.

Now smaller parties are concentrating their efforts on the 56 regional list seats - seven of them available from each of the eight regions. One incentive could be the £500 deposit required to be a candidate in each constituency, while £500 is also sufficient to get region-wide publicity for the party's cause, returnable if the candidate passes the 5% mark.

In Highland and Lothian, for example, the ballot form is so long it will be a major challenge to the new electronic scanners that will this year speed up the counting process. Those mobilised to use the list system feature two Christian parties that disagree on their brand of religious politics. There are also parties arguing for different brands of socialism, nationalism, even Jacobitism and racism. Independents hope to repeat Margo MacDonald's success in Lothian, including two from Glasgow's Pakistani community.

The Scottish Socialist Party and the breakaway Solidarity movement led by Tommy Sheridan are focusing efforts on the lists, and the Greens are utilising the same tactic as 2003, though in a more crowded field for winning the environment vote.

While much attention is focused on the prospect of a change of administration at Holyrood, a major change is assured across Scotland's councils. A new voting system is certain to remove Labour from control of many of its traditional fiefdoms, and to have only slim majorities in the others.

But, first, voters have to understand how they use ballot forms. On pages 22-23 of this election guide, The Herald explains how to vote, both for Holyrood and for councils. It is then up to you to decide which way to vote - and to decide Scotland's future.

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