2023 postcode search summary

The votes are counted and ballot boxes packed away - so how did the 2023 elections go?

This year, for the second time in its eight-year history, Democracy Club’s polling station finder was able to provide results for all council areas holding elections. This means that every single UK council has now provided us with polling station data at some point over the last eight years, a fantastic milestone reached. Once again, enormous thanks to all the electoral services teams who made this possible.

This year we also met another long-running goal of getting the BBC to use our data. From 26 April onwards, a postcode lookup service was available on multiple pages of the BBC news website for English and Northern Irish users. This served our candidate and polling station information to readers via the API of the Electoral Commission.

We’ll have more information on all of this (including where things didn’t go so well!) in our annual report.

The numbers 🛫

Between 00:00 Monday 1 May and 22:00 Thursday 4 May, our elections database processed 1,871,446 UK postcode searches. Of these searches, 1,314,468 came from English council areas holding elections on 4 May.

Between 00:00 Monday 15 May and 22:00 Thursday 18 May, our elections database processed 183,095 UK postcode searches. Of these searches, 48,188 came from Northern Irish council areas holding elections on 18 May.

Taken together, we processed over two million postcode searches during the month of May. This is over a million postcode searches more than we received the last time these elections were held, in 2019.

View election week postcode searches by Local Authority

Happy users 🥰

We’ll have a breakdown of user feedback as usual in the coming weeks. For now, here’s some cherry-picked praise:

• Easy, quick info, useful

• I was feeling apathetic and not going to vote now I feel I’ve got to make the effort

• nothing more to add. everything is just fine

• Great that this information is available and easy to access

• Lost polling card - so useful to get info here or would have gone to wrong station

📈