Case study: Vote.Wales and polling place accessibility

Working with Welsh electoral services, the Welsh Government, and the Electoral Management Board for Wales, Democracy Club collected and published accessibility information for over 2,000 polling places across Wales.

“We created vote.wales to give people voting confidence.

Allowing people to see what accessibility provision was available at their polling station made a big difference to voters across Wales.

The Electoral Management Board is grateful to all 22 councils in Wales who provided this information with enthusiasm, and to Democracy Club whose fantastic work made it possible for us to share it with voters.”
The Electoral Management Board for Wales

The challenge

Democracy Club runs the UK’s online polling station finder. We do this by collecting data from councils ahead of each election. Prior to 2024, this information only included the address of the polling place, with no additional information about the polling place building. In 2023 we were approached by Ceredigion Council electoral services, as part of the Welsh Democratic Engagement Partnership group, to see if this was something we could explore. The immediate motivation was the 2022 Elections Act, which required councils to make a full review of all their polling places with regard to accessibility.

The solution

We applied for and won a grant from the Welsh Government to trial accessibility data at the 2024 Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) Elections. After reviewing the polling station selection guidance issued by the Electoral Commission, we sent a consultation to all Welsh councils who had expressed an interest in the pilot. Ten responded with their thoughts, and from these responses we drew up a list of questions to ask about each polling place:

• Is this a temporary structure?
• Is there level access to the station?
• [If no to previous]: is the ramp permanent or temporary?
• Is there parking nearby?
• Is disabled parking available?
• Is there a hearing loop?
• Are there publicly accessible toilets on site?

In the 2024 election we received and published this information from six Welsh councils.

Vote.Wales

The 2024 election would have remained a one-off were it not for the Elections and Elected Bodies (Wales) Act 2024. This required the Welsh government to establish a ‘Welsh elections information platform’, which, among other things, must provide voters with ‘information about accessibility arrangements that are in place at polling stations’. This launched in 2026 as Vote.Wales, run by the Electoral Management Board (EMB), part of the Democracy and Boundary Commission for Cymru (DBCC).

In order to meet this statutory requirement, the EMB turned to Democracy Club to provide a postcode lookup function, as well as accessibility information, but this time including all 22 Welsh councils. This was a complete success: by mid-March, all 22 councils had supplied accessibility data on their polling venues - 2,171 in total. This was the first time this data has been available for an entire UK nation.

The result

The accessibility information was published via a postcode lookup on Vote.Wales, providing individually relevant voting information to tens of thousands of Welsh voters in the run-up to polling day.

Alongside providing Welsh voters with greater confidence, this project provided a snapshot of the types of buildings and locations (2.4% of Welsh stations were in temporary structures) which host polling stations. It also helped some electoral services teams think about the types of buildings they select, by comparing all of these structures against our template. One council told us:

“We found this a useful exercise. We plan to use the template and update it further as we gather more knowledge about our stations and any new ones we have to use.”