Case Study: The Electoral Office for Northern Ireland

“Working with Democracy Club on this has been refreshing – their staff are truly experts and have provided significant support to the delivery of a key information resource for Northern Ireland. This work has not only saved time and resource but has also improved the service for the Northern Ireland public.”
David Marshall, Chief Electoral Officer

The Challenge

The Electoral Office for Northern Ireland (EONI) organises and runs all elections held across the region’s eleven council areas. It handles over 600 polling places, more than any other UK authority, and has a total electoral register of over 1.4 million voters. EONI maintains two separate polling schemes: one for local elections, and one for assembly and parliamentary elections.

EONI wanted to be able to tell voters where their polling station is at any time of year. It also needs to provide political parties with constant access to its polling schemes, for reasons of transparency and trust. To meet these requirements, EONI maintained its own in-house polling station finder, available on its website. This worked well for the user but was laborious for EONI to maintain and did not offer the enhanced mapping and data checking capabilities they needed, especially when boundary changes occurred.

Having seen how our own polling station finder works, EONI approached us to ask if they could replace their finder with Where Do I Vote. This request differed from our usual work for councils in the rest of the UK, because our finder typically displays polling stations only at election time, rather than year-round. EONI also wanted improved error-checking and mapping for their large address and polling station database: while we routinely do this for all councils who provide us with polling station data, hitherto this was done locally on our developer’s computers, without the ability for electoral services to view and interact with the results.

The Solution

We were able to modify our polling station finder to allow for year-round display of Northern Ireland polling stations. We added additional text to make it clear to voters which polling scheme they were viewing (the default being the parliamentary/assembly station), and improved our systems so that we can more easily switch between the two schemes.

In terms of data checking, we built a tool which allows EONI to easily map their polling stations, showing which addresses were assigned to each. This makes spotting mistakes much easier (a house accidentally assigned to a station many miles away, for example), and will also help EONI organise their polling districts more efficiently.

The Result

EONI now links to Where Do I Vote from their website, rather than maintaining their own finder. This has saved them time and resources, while Northern Ireland voters are able to use the same service as the rest of the UK to find their polling station.

The maps we provided significantly improved EONI’s ability to manage their polling schemes. They plan to allow access to these maps to political parties, so that everyone has access to the same live data and it can be inspected at any time, without the need to contact EONI. This will improve public confidence in the electoral process, while also reducing the administrative burden on EONI.