If there were elections, then I agree you really should have received papers. The person you need to contact in the first case is the Electoral Registration Officer in your local council. The returning officer is a post that is filled when an election takes place, and doesn’t exist outside of elections or get involved with maintaining the electoral list. Failing that, local councillors may be able to help?

Twice in two years, I have not been able to vote because I have not received all/any of the paperwork in the post.

I am registered to vote by post and live in the E11 area.

To whom should I write to complain? The returning officer?

The returning officer at a count does his utmost to avoid rejecting ballot papers - the whole exercise is designed to determine the will of the electorate, after all. Within any batch of ballot papers, there will be some where the mark is uncertain, or someone has scribbled out a mark and made another one, or the ballot paper is blank, or there are too many marks. Therefore, ballot papers can be rejected for being blank, for being uncertain, or for over-voting. Election officials cannot read the mind of the voter, they can only try to read the ballot paper and, wherever humanly possible, allocate the vote to a candidate or party.
Where ballot papers are uncertain, there is an adjudication process that takes place which is open and transparent to all the candidates, their agents and other observers.
So, to come back to Mavis’s point, if the majority of the regional/constituency papers which were rejected were done so on the basis of over-voting, the problem must lie with the actions of the voter. The proximate cause of over-voting was the design of the voting sheet, with the two ballots side-by-side. The ultimate cause is that, generally, the Scottish electorate don’t understand the basis on which their MSPs are elected and that the regional vote is the one that determines the number of seats that parties have in Parliament. Evidence considered by the Arbuthnott Commission makes that clear.
It is clear that Scots, like any other nation in the world, can understand new electoral systems and STV worked very well. It is also clear that the problems arose because not enough effort was put in to explaining the existing system for electing MSPs.
Yes, the design of the ballot paper has something to do with it (see a recent post on my blog for comparison with a ballot paper designed for New Zealand which overcomes these problems), but the Executive must explain to the voters in Scotland how the parliamentary elections really do work.
Ignorance? - hard word, but probably accurate in this case.

The difference is not a Scotland/England thing AFAIK. The polling ‘place’ is the actual location i.e. the school or local halls being used. The polling ’station’ is the section of the ‘place’ where you actually cast your vote.

My local polling ‘place’ had three separate ’stations’ divided by street name alphabetical order, where the ’stations’ were trestle tables with woefully under-trained polling clerks

I do so hate how people put ’spoiled’ votes down to voter ignorance. Maybe people spoil them on purpose because there is no column on the ballot paper which says ‘I don’t like any of you’.

Also pleased to note you are still practising the piano. I was wondering as you have not mentioned it in a long while.