Democracy Club Blog

Collecting candidate statements is hard, let's collect emails instead

A reflection on the problems of collecting candidate statements at scale, and a proposed solution.

A letter to John Pullinger, new Electoral Commission chair

We write to John Pullinger the new Chair of The Electoral Commission with our thoughts on how the Commission can provide better information to voters over his five year term

What Van Halen can teach us about data

On the day that the GDS registers are shut down, we reflect on the Government’s National Data Strategy and offer 5 suggestions for whatever comes next

The Electoral Commission at 20

We wish The Electoral Commission a happy birthday the only way we know how: by thinking about its future effectiveness.

We need a single agency to be responsible for UK elections

No one in the UK is responsible for the health or security of the UK’s democracy.

Why we can't rely on GSS codes, and what to do about it

New administrative areas in the UK are given identifiers. There is an unpredictable lapse of time between the boundary being published and the identifier being published, and that makes the identifiers less useful for anyone covering elections.

AddressBase and openness

The closed address database in the UK forces us to into a trade off between openness and accuracy.

Ordnance Survey are getting in the way of open election data

The Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE) created data about elections months ago and Ordnance Survey are getting in the way by blocking its publication until after the elections in May. This means we can’t tell millions of people what elections they have this May.

What's the future of the UK's Electoral Commission?

The UK’s Electoral Commission is carrying out a full strategic review of its future. We made some suggestions.

Making local elections better, finding polling stations, watching GOV.UK/register-to-vote

We asked #localgovcamp how to make local elections better. Here’s what they said. (Oh and the government’s voter registration site went down. Oops.) And a status report on finding London’s polling stations…

Poor mapping data is harming the UK's democracy

We want to do something simple. We want to let everyone in the UK know what elections they are able to vote in on the 5th of May.

That’s it. Do I, an eligible voter in a country that is proud of its old democracy, have an election in the next 10 weeks, or not?

'Service registers' on governmental websites

Our proposal for all government websites to publish a sort of machine readable ‘index’ of all the services and data they offer, with URLs to these services.

Mapping the projects

As I said on Sunday, keeping track of all the projects and tools out there is a little overwhelming sometimes.