Recall petitions in our API

We’ve recently been asked by the Electoral Commission to provide information about the Rutherglen and Hamilton West recall petition in our voting information API. Working with South Lanarkshire Council, the Commission want to be able to tell people about the petition, explain how it works, and let them know where they can sign it, if they wish.

Our API contains candidate and polling station information for everything from weekly council by-elections to general elections.

A recall petition isn’t really an election, so our normal systems for tracking them don’t apply, but people in Rutherglen and Hamilton West constituency will be able to visit their assigned “signing station” in order to express their desire to remove their MP. In this respect, the model isn’t too dissimilar from our polling station finder - like polling stations, electors can only sign at the station assigned to their address.

It makes sense for us to provide this information to our API customers, so this morning we added it to the API. If you’re not an API user already and would like to direct people to their signing station get in touch.

How to access the data

For existing API users, you will need to pass &recall_petition=1 to all API requests. If you do this, you will see a new parl_recall_petition key in the response. If it’s not null then there is a recall petition for this query.

The object will look like this:

"parl_recall_petition": {
    "name": "Rutherglen and Hamilton West recall petition",
    "signing_start": "2023-06-20",
    "signing_end": "2023-07-31",
    "signing_station": {
    "station_id": "1-south-lanarkshire-lifestyles-eastfield",
    "address": "South Lanarkshire Lifestyles Eastfield\nGlenside Drive\nRutherglen",
    "postcode": "G73 3LW"
    }
  }

signing_station can be null if there is a recall petition but we don’t know where the user should go. You should ask them to call their council in this case.

Note, you will need to show users an address picker as per normal if there is more than one signing station allocated to the postcode.