WhereDoIVote turns 10

WhereDoIVote.co.uk in 2017: the square logo days.

On Saturday 21 February 2015, I sat down and wrote the first version of a brand new project: a UK polling station finder. By the 28th of Feb we had our first council, West Berkshire, live on the site.

Now, 10 years later, that project is stronger than ever. Tens of millions of people have used the service, with over 14 million of them in the 2024 general election alone.

It’s found its way to the front pages of national newspapers, been promoted to all UK users of Twitter (when it was Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, and more. It helps power The Electoral Commission’s website, and it’s used by the BBC for their election coverage. The majority of UK councils now promote the finder to their voters at election time.

Most importantly, voter feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We have made a difference.

This has very much been a team effort. In the early days, David Millar and Joanna Geary got us to a proof of concept. Chris started submitting pull requests on GitHub almost exactly nine years ago. Will started helping us out in 2019, and we added another Will a couple of years ago, for good measure. Many more have contributed to the code over the years. Not to mention the polling station assistants and others who helped build our relationships with councils.

Unlike our candidates database, we can’t crowdsource the data for a polling station finder. The only way to be sure we give voters accurate information is to partner with councils and get data from them directly. Early on we thought it might be a good use of Freedom of Information requests, but we quickly found that it was far better to talk to the actual electoral administrators. This allows us to get notified about any updates that might happen last minute.

I initially assumed this would be an easy project. How hard can adding some polling stations to a map really be? I’ll spare all the details, but it turns out it’s really quite tricky to get right. The key to this service is that everyone gets told exactly the right information. Getting something wrong means we send someone a station where they can’t cast their vote. That’s an inconvenience at best, or someone who might not vote at worst. Being obsessed with this was the key to gaining the trust of the electoral community.

In the early days it was much harder to get the data we needed. Electoral administrators are at their busiest just at the same time as we were asking them to do even more work.

Early supporters with councils like Phil and Neil really helped us understand how we can improve the product, and exactly how complicated things can get. Early on the electoral software vendors added dedicated export functions for the data we needed and soon enough councils were relying on us to run their online polling station finders.

As of 2022 we’ve worked with every local authority in the UK, and we expect to have full coverage for every UK poll from now on. Over the last couple of years we’ve had full coverage for all scheduled elections, capping the decade with every single UK council for the 2024 general election.

A huge amount of this is due to our partnership with The Electoral Commission. Early on, they saw the value in this service, both to voters and to electoral services teams. Their support has helped us work with local authorities and critically over the last few years, helped to fund its ongoing development. We should also mention the Association of Electoral Administrators, who have been key in getting buy-in from the final few councils.

We’re now in a position where we’re thinking about the future of the finder. We’ve recently started hosting the finder for The Electoral Office of Northern Ireland, allowing voters to find their station year-round. We’ve supported the Welsh Government’s pilots in advance voting stations, and last year we ran a pilot on adding information about the accessibility of polling stations.

We look forward to continuing to iterate this service for at least the next ten years. But for now, I’ll end with: WhereDoIVote.co.uk, many happy return(ing officers).

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