Democracy Club Ballotin: October

This is an HTML version of an email we sent on 20 Oct 2023.

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Welcome to Democracy Club’s new-look mailing list! We’ll be providing monthly updates, with information on what we’ve been up to and wider UK elections news. All past emails are now accessible in an online archive.

Democracy Club is a non-profit Community Interest Company. Working with our dedicated network of volunteers, we provide the most comprehensive election information services in the UK. If you’re new to Democracy Club or need a refresher on who we are, check out our website. Our election tools are free to use, but not free to maintain. To help us continue our work, please consider a donation.

We’re hiring!

Each year Democracy Club hires a part-time Elections Assistant to help with our work towards the May local elections. We’ve just posted the job ad for next year’s role. View the job advert here.

Why we’re excited about the Elections and Elected Bodies (Wales) Bill 2024, and you should be too

On 3 October, the Welsh Government introduced a new Bill which will transform how electoral data is managed and published in Wales. If enacted, it will introduce automatic voter registration and a digital "elections information platform" for Welsh elections (Senedd and council). Our recent blog post provides a quick summary of the bits we’re most excited about. Read the blog.

Opening the register of political parties

Ever wondered how political parties are registered and regulated in the UK? How many political parties are there, anyway? Earlier this year, we made some changes to the political party pages on WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk. A key aim for us was to make the Electoral Commission’s register of political parties a bit more accessible for voters. We used the opportunity to take a look at the history of the register, why it came about and how many parties are on it today. Read the blog.

What we’re working on

We selected a few examples of our recent work to highlight below. For more details on our recent work, please see our latest blog.

  • Candidate data. We’ve published a draft ‘build your own’ candidate spreadsheet generator. You can try it out now.
  • Election results. WhoCanIVoteFor now displays turnout data.
  • Deselected candidates. We now flag candidates who have been dropped by their party but can’t be removed from the ballot paper.
  • We’ve worked with the House of Commons Library to match their MP database to ours. This opens up some neat possibilities, including better integration with Wikidata.

Current and future elections to watch

Did you know WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk covers by-elections? Head over to the front page to find a list of all upcoming by-elections taking place over the next month. Yesterday, two parliamentary by-elections (Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth) were held, while an election for the Mayor of Hackney is due on 9 November.

The next UK general election will happen no later than January 2025, although it is expected to occur sooner than that (if one R. Sunak is reading this, we’d appreciate a hint…). Do you work for an organisation which is planning something related to the election? We’ve prepared an overview of what we do on our blog - if you have any questions or think there’s scope for a partnership, we want to hear from you. The sooner we hear from you, the more likely we can work together!

What’s next? In the next few months we plan to:

  • Improve the process of importing polling station data. This is so we can manage a snap general election better
  • Improve our bot’s ability to understand candidate nomination documents. This is to speed up our crowdsourcing efforts to allow us to build a better candidates database
  • Add more endpoints to our public API, as well as making other improvements that will help partners and data users deliver better information to their users
  • ..and lots more, including info on general election candidates, and the full list of local elections taking place next May. Stay tuned for more exciting instalments!

P.S. This is a new email template. If it looks a bit odd, please let us know!