Welcome to the July 2026 edition of Democracy Club’s regular newsletter. All past emails are accessible in an online archive.

Polling scheme maps for Northern Ireland

We’re very excited to introduce you to a project we’ve been working on with the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland (EONI). Earlier this year we described how we’ve been helping EONI map and manage their polling districts using a bespoke online tool we built for them.

EONI are now consulting on the polling station scheme to be used for the 2027 Northern Ireland elections. To help people understand what is being proposed, they’ve published our mapping tool for the public to explore. The map will be available online at least until 2 October, when the consultation ends: check it out!

Learn more about the map on our blog.

Voting pilot evaluation

Four council areas ran flexible voting pilots during the May local elections in England. This involved voting in advance of polling day, or in a single central location. The Electoral Commission has now published an evaluation of these pilots. While they have found that the pilots ran smoothly and the voters who used them were enthusiastic, the small number of pilots and low public awareness means that the findings are somewhat limited; more and bigger pilots are needed to really test the impact of these interventions. Read the Report

From the perspective of digital democracy, section four of the report contains some particularly interesting comments on the use of digital registers.

Reorganisation continues

Easily missed amidst the other political news this month, the government announced 14 new areas are to have their councils reorganised and merged. We’re looking at how we can better explain these changes to voters at the next elections. This includes displaying more maps on WhoCanIVoteFor - watch this space!

The Electoral Commission will be hiring developers

Last year the Electoral Commission committed to taking our polling station finder in-house. This project is progressing well, and we expect an advert to go out for in-house Python developers at some point in the coming month. We’ll promote the position when advertised, so keep an eye on our socials in the coming days.

Elections to watch

We’re aware of fifteen council by-elections taking place in August. There’s also the small matter of the Clacton parliamentary by-election, which takes place on 13 August. 34 candidates are standing (the most ever on a parliamentary ballot) and we’ve sourced photographs and election information for almost all of them. You can see a list of all upcoming by-elections on the front page of WhoCanIVoteFor.