Thoughts on the Elections Strategy

Public notices, 18th century style

Earlier this month the government published its ‘Strategy for modern and secure elections’.

The main items have been widely covered: votes at 16 and changes to the registration process that will facilitate automatic voter registration. But there are some smaller points that might have a huge impact on the way we work, and these are what we discuss in this post.

We propose…

1. The Electoral Commission should be given the power and ability to request electoral data directly from council election software.
2. The definition of ‘publishing’ an election notice should be modified to require digital posting to a central government repository.
3. The government and Electoral Commission should explore combining the proposed candidate identity verification and candidate finance reporting to create a database of all UK election candidates.

What the strategy says

Points 21 and 26 of the strategy’s annex commit the government to the following things:

21: Undertake more work in the longer term to assess the viability of an online candidate information service at UK Parliamentary general elections (and possibly other elections).

26: Take legislative power to require Electoral Registration Officers/Returning Officers to provide election information to government and/or the Electoral Commission to support development of elector information services.

We think that, if implemented in a modern digital system, these two suggestions could unlock a huge amount of potential for state-provided voter information: allowing the state to rapidly collect and publish accurate information on the candidates and parties standing for election.

It’s worth stressing how radical these changes could be: at present the state has virtually no role in collecting election information, promoting elections, or informing voters, beyond a few specific areas. This is in stark contrast to other European nations, where state-run databases and non-partisan election tools are the norm.

Automated data transfer

The systems that electoral services teams use are called Electoral Management Software, or EMS for short. These systems do a huge amount of tasks, from managing the electoral roll to facilitating communication with polling station staff.

The good news is that almost everything we need to run our services are stored in these systems. This includes elections, candidates and polling stations. There are only four EMS suppliers in the UK, so in theory it’s possible to get them all to automate exports to the Electoral Commission.

This is where the proposed powers in point 21 come in. We think the Commission should use this power to request information in an automated and machine readable format. The details can be worked out, but at a high level it’s easy enough to imagine that information that the EMS stores could be sent to the Commission automatically.

We’re not suggesting this include personal information. We’re thinking about the existing information that’s typically published online in PDFs: lists of candidates, polling stations, and the like.

Digital notices

Throughout UK legislation is a duty to “give public notice”. The idea behind this is simple: there is a thing that is important enough that the public needs to know about it, so there is a duty to notify them.

The problem is, as far as we can tell, there isn’t a universal definition of what “giving notice” means. It could mean nailing some paper to a tree, or publishing in The Gazette, or anything in between.

Our suggestion is that we define public notices (for elections, but it might be interesting to consider this for all notices) to include publishing a machine readable version of the notice to a general repository. Doing this would satisfy the duty in law, but wouldn’t remove the option of publishing elsewhere. People who visit the local tree would still get their notices that way if the council so wished.

Specifically the notices we’re thinking about are:

• Notice of election: this would prevent us having to search across all councils for the by-elections that happen each week.
• Statement of Persons Nominated: this is the document we crowdsource each year. A digital version of this would allow us and the Commission to generate a list of every candidate standing for every election, automatically.
• Notice of countermanded elections: this relates to ‘cancelation’ or postponement of elections, e.g if a candidate has died.
• Declaration of results: like the list of candidates, this would allow for automated results collection.

There will be many more, but hopefully it’s easy to see how some automation in this space would make information gathering a lot easier. In turn this would make running digital services that inform the public a lot easier.

Candidate identification

There is a lot in the strategy about candidates. We welcome the steps to prevent intimidation and harassment of candidates. We hope this can be done in a way that balances voters’ need to engage with a candidate’s campaign (e.g by finding out their positions on particular topics) with the candidates right to safety.

Of particular interest to us is the requirement for candidates to report campaign spending to the Commission. For the Commission to receive spending information from candidates, they need to have a list of all candidates, and a way to verify that a candidate is who they say they are.

We wonder if we can combine the initial verification at nomination time with the verification that the Commission needs at reporting time.

It might be possible to use the GOV.UK One Login system to both verify candidates at nomination time and log them in when they report campaign activity. This would look like a single nomination system that would work a little like the ‘register to vote’ service: it would perform some initial basic checks and then submit data to the council’s EMS. It could go further than the existing system by linking candidacies over time, providing an electoral history of each person (as our database currently does, though very imperfectly).

This is an idea that needs a lot more thought, but we think it might be an interesting approach to managing nominations and candidate verification. This is an especially hard problem at local elections when we can see over 30,000 candidates standing.

Looking to the future

Our friends at mySociety have described the strategy as a ‘solid start’, and we’d agree with this. It has the potential to transform the way elections are managed and promoted in the UK, providing a more level playing field and reducing pain points for candidates, electoral administrators, and voters. The devil, of course, will be in the detail, something we hope our suggestions will help inform.