Find your polling station
In 36 days, you’ll hopefully be voting in the general election. At Democracy Club, we’ve tried to build tools and create datasets that will help you do this as a better informed voter.
We’ve tried to make it easy to find out who your local candidates are. We’ve tried to make it easy to see their professional and educational experience. And we’ve tried to highlight opportunities to meet them in person.
But of course, there’s one more crucial step - assuming you’ve already registered. And that’s actually knowing where to go vote.
If you’ve registered, you’ll be sent a polling card by the council. This will have the address of your polling station, and probably a map showing you where it is.
But we think there are a few reasons why you might need that information to be online.
For example, you might lose your card - or you might not have it with you when you’re out and about on Thursday 7 May. We think you - and lots of others - might try to Google it and find out where it is.
So, in the best Democracy Club fashion, we started by looking for data that already exists. Kudos to the councils who already publish this - we’ve taken a sample and made a prototype to give an idea of what this tool might look like.
But we’d like to have this working for as many locations as possible by 7 May. With the help of Twitter, we’ve asked every council for the raw data on where polling station are and how houses are allocated to them.
We’re getting more and more data back, and will be uploading it soon - watch this space.
Please get in touch if you’d like to hear more about this project, join our group to talk about it, or dive in to github if you’d like to help us build it