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

Election report

We’ve published our report on our activities during the May 2026 local and devolved elections. Here are the highlights:

Over 10 million postcode searches over the election period.
Over 76% user satisfaction on our services
Added details including advance voting and accessibility information to our polling station finder.
Supplied the data which powered the Welsh Government’s official voter information platform.

Read the report.

Accessibility at polling stations

One thing we’d particularly like to highlight from this year is our work on polling station accessibility for the Welsh Electoral Management Board. Last year we were approached by the Democracy and Boundary Commission Cymru to see if we could use our services to provide voters with more information about their polling station building - whether it had parking, stairs, etc. Working with council electoral services teams, we collected this information about each of Wales’ 2,000 polling places, and published the answers on our polling station finder and in our API. This was also used to power the postcode lookup on the official Vote.Wales election information platform. You can read more about this project on our blog.

AVR in Wales

In a UK first, the Welsh Government has confirmed plans to introduce Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) ahead of next year’s local council elections. This follows the success of a 2025 pilot scheme which enrolled an additional 14,500 voters across four Welsh councils.

Data such as council tax records will be used to enroll people, who will be given the opportunity to opt-out. However, this scheme will only enroll voters for Senedd and council elections, and may introduce additional confusion for voters about which elections they are registered to vote in. The full regulations and explanatory memorandum have now been published.

Elections to watch

The by-elections keep rolling in! We’re aware of over forty council elections taking place in the UK over July. There will also be two major by-elections: Norfolk Police and Crime Commissioner on 16 July, and Mayor of Greater Manchester on 30 July. The latter will be the largest by-election ever held in the UK. You can browse all upcoming elections on the front page of Who Can I Vote For.

All the best,

The Democracy Club Team