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

2025 has been a very big year for Democracy Club, one in which we made fantastic progress towards achieving our vision of a country with digital and data foundations to support everyone’s participation in democracy. This newsletter contains some recent updates as usual, plus a review of our year.

The Democracy Network

The Democracy Network is a grouping of organisations and people who work in and around democracy in the UK, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. We’re pleased to announce that Democracy Club and The Politics Project have been chosen by the Network’s steering group as new hosts of the Network. You can read more about this in the Network’s latest bulletin (which we would strongly recommend subscribing to!).

Our board has a new chair

We’re delighted to announce that Torsten de Reise has been appointed the new chair of our board. Torsten will lead on our strategy review and help set our direction as we navigate the handover of some of our services to the Electoral Commission. We’ll have a full update on this and other governance changes in the new year.

Other news

Voter registration pilots

The Electoral Commission has published a report on automatic voter registration pilots in three Welsh council areas; overall these seem to have been a striking success, and point the way to further innovation in the near future. 14,576 new electors were registered, with very high accuracy and very low opt-out rates. Read the report.

More postponements

On 4 December the government announced that four Combined Authority elections, due to take place in 2026, will now occur in 2028. There might be more postponements in the near future. On the 18th the government invited councils with elections in 2026 to propose delays to their polls to facilitate reorganisation in these areas. Councils have until 15 January to do so.

One side effect of all these postponements is that our blog post on election cancellations from 2024 has become the most-read piece on our site this year. Why not read it again?

Democracy Club’s 2025 in review

We’ve had a fantastic year. Here are some highlights.

The future of the polling station finder

The Electoral Commission confirmed that they would be taking our polling station finder in-house before the next general election. This marked the culmination of ten years’ work, and we’re delighted that this crucial piece of infrastructure will soon be provided directly by the state.

Election leaflets

In March we relaunched our popular database of election leaflets, with an improved upload experience and new filters to make for easy browsing. Have you received some election literature recently? Upload it now.

Parish councils

In January we announced a new project on town and parish councils, in partnership with the National Association of Local Councils. We have so far collected and published the results of the 2024 and 2025 parish council elections, as well as producing an analysis of the role of political parties at this level of government. We’ll be producing another report for the 2026 elections.

Other partnerships

We used our polling station finder to help facilitate Walsall council’s polling district review consultation, and learned a lot along the way!

Our elections results database is now complete back to 2016, thanks to some amazing work from volunteer Jason Leman, a researcher working on localist political parties in the UK.

The 2025 elections

And we did all of this while covering the 2025 local elections as usual, working with the Electoral Commission, BBC News and others, and providing high-quality voter-information in response to 1.5 million requests from the public. Our candidates database (which powers WhoCanIVoteFor) saw more than 30,000 edits. Thanks again to everyone who helped out!

Happy new year

We hope you have a great Christmas, and we'll be back in the new year. The next elections are two by-elections on 15 January - learn more on WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk!

All the best,

The Democracy Club Team