A new home for the polling station finder
We are excited that after many years of partnership with the Electoral Commission, they have announced a plan to take our online polling station finder in-house.
This is an important moment for us. We founded the polling station finder over a decade ago. Since then it’s helped millions of voters, and is used by local authorities, media, and many other partners.
The Electoral Commission has been involved in this project almost from the very start. Since 2017, our elections and polling station data has powered a postcode lookup on the Commission’s website, and is now a core part of their online offering to voters. The Commission has enthusiastically embraced the project, working closely with us to collect polling station data from councils, add new features to the finder, and expand its scope and capabilities. Based on this experience, and its central position in the UK electoral landscape, we believe that the Electoral Commission is the natural home for the service.
For the last few years, the Electoral Commission has been funding us to run their API and part of their website. This agreement also includes support for Commission partners like the BBC. This partnership has worked very well for each of us, but we’ve long argued that, for true long-term sustainability, the polling station finder would be better off being delivered directly by the Commission.
We believe this is the right direction of travel, not only for the Commission, but also for us. While we are in a comfortable financial position at present, we cannot offer the project the long-term certainty that the Commission can. The polling station finder is now used by every council in the country, and has matured to the point that we feel we can let it go. We also have plenty of other projects we want to work on!
The plan
The Electoral Commission have just published their five year corporate plan, containing the following:
Working with Democracy Club and local councils we will continue to provide postcode specific election information to enable voters to find out which elections are taking place, who is standing, and where to vote. This service is currently provided by Democracy Club, and we plan to bring it in-house during the period of this Corporate Plan to ensure its sustainability and achieve greater value for money.
We believe that as well as offering long term sustainability, the Commission is in a better place than us to make improvements to the service. More of our work in recent years has been trying to find systematic ways of working with partners to improve data quality, coverage and the information we can display. The Commission can lead on these issues in a way that we, as a small independent organisation, would never be able to.
What this means in practice
For this May’s local elections: nothing will change. Both Democracy Club and the Commission’s APIs, widgets and websites will remain as they currently are.
We both have a strong commitment to continue the current level of service. After May 2025 we will start making a detailed plan for how we transfer services to the Commission. Essential in all of this is that there is no disruption to services in any way.
This means we will work on a phased approach where we break down the service into smaller chunks and only hand over each small part when we both agree it’s ready.
This is likely to take some years to complete. If you’re a council or customer of our services, please feel free to reach out about how this might affect you.
We know that a lot of councils and other partners rely on our elections widget. This will be covered in the handover; indeed, the Commission already run their own widget, using our data. We will support our APIs, websites, and other services until at least 2029, the expected year of the next general election.
Candidates and other services
As well as the polling station finder, we run a number of other services. Our candidates data is the best known. We will be running this as normal, but hopefully we’ll be able to work with the commission to automate the core nomination data collection. This is very much ‘phase two’ of the project, so for now there’s still plenty of PDFs to transcribe!
Other services like ElectionLeaflets, ‘your area’ and our planned representatives project will continue. We need to think about sustainability and funding for each of these, and more broadly what the future looks like after 2029.
As a result of this, we’re going to be writing a new strategy over the summer. Democracy Club started with a strong commitment to our community, and we want this to continue as we plan the next few years. Watch this space!
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