It's oh so quiet
Live images from Democracy Club HQ. Joking! We don’t have a HQ
So! Seven days later and we’ve been mainly taking it a bit easy. Except those democracy clubbers who decided to go for the impossible and collate all the results. (This is the third time we’ve achieved the impossible, but who’s counting?). And we’re thinking about another party…
🗳 Omg, we have all the results data 🗳
If you’re a long-time follower of the club, you’ll know we’ve ummed and ahhhed about results data a fair bit. Partly because we’ve thought that the pre-election information is the important thing, and partly cos we’re knackered post-election. But! Lots of people come to us and ask ‘who won?’. And lots of people do want full open results data (including political parties…donations welcome, folks).
So it is very exciting that within a week of last Thursday’s local elections, volunteers (and a handy resultsbot) had managed to collect every single result. That’s not just declaring who controls the council (hello BBC website) — that’s what number of votes did each of the 16,000 candidates get?
Amazing stuff! The first time we’ve had a complete set of local election results.
If you had elections recently, you can find your local results at WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk.
You can enjoy delving into Russs’ map of all the results.
Or you can get all the data here. Please let us know how you’re using it.
One data moan, since we’re here and it’s us. It turns out that the availability of turnout and size of electorate data is quite bad — not all authorities publish it or it gets calculated in different ways. If we’re going to start measuring whether what we do affects turnout, we’re going to need better data. We’d guess that quite a lot of pro-democracy types have an interest in this information, so get in touch for a chat if that’s you.
☀️ Summer party ☀️
We’re having some kind of event! Maybe a walk! In summer! We’d love you to join us to chat about our work and what we should do next.
We’re not sure where this event will be at the moment, but it’ll try to coincide with the Equaliteas events and with National Democracy Week; so somewhere with some relevance to the struggle for women’s suffrage would be great.
The first thing to do is to arrange a date. Please complete this Doodle with your availability!
Then feel free to suggest a location. Manchester is the only one on the list so far…
📅 What’s next? 📅
One last sprint on this election to wrap up loose ends and prepare for setting goals for the next year. (Next year: think 2019 local elections and, whisper it, the possibility of another general election…as well as any unexpected fun that Brexit might bring.)
We’ll be saying goodbye to Rose, who’s provided terrific support in communicating with councils and data re-users and much more. Look out for Rose’s Review of Democracy Club on the blog next week!
And the by-elections keep coming — check out the PDFs that need to be converted into candidate data!
Forward!
Photo by Nolan Issac on Unsplash