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GE2019 Election Tech Handbook

✏️ Edit this document to make it better ✏️

A crowdsourced resource for technologists building things for the general election

blame this on The London College of Political Technology at Newspeak House

Projects

Political Data

Events & Community

Signal Group ↗️

WhatsApp Group ↗️

How to use this handbook

1. Join Signal Group (or old WhatsApp) group for updates: ElectionTechHandbookChat

1. the main group is for announcements related to the handbook there’s also an open chat group.

2. also there’s a facebook group electiontechhandbook.uk/fb

3. you can also hassle @nwspk

2. If you’re (thinking of) building something to do with politics or the upcoming election, add it to the list below. These can be partisan or non-partisan, free or paid, almost finished or just ideas looking for contributors - stick them down anyway.

1. there is a comprehensive library of political data here that might be helpful: electiontechhandbook.uk/data

2. if you’ve never done any political campaigning before, read this: how to make a difference in an election

3. check what you’re doing is legal: Campaigning Legal Guide: Politics, Elections and Lobbying

4. if you’re collecting user data, please do so responsibly: responsibledata.io/resources/handbook

3. If you’re not sure what to do but you want to get involved:

1. check out the community page for online groups, meetups, etc: electiontechhandbook.uk/community

2. have a read through the projects listed below - they probably need your help

3. peruse the datasets page for inspiration: electiontechhandbook.uk/data

4. If you’re organising meetups, hackathons, groups or doing any kind of online or offline organising of technologists, add the details here: electiontechhandbook.uk/community

5. Share this handbook far and wide ❤️

e.g. retweet this: https://twitter.com/nwspk/status/1169150244833103872

Election Results

Non-partisan data infrastructure

Voter Registration & Turnout

Targeted Political Advertising

Voter Education

Disinformation & Misinformation

Tactical Voting/Campaigning

Filterbubble Breakers

Campaigns

Campaigning & Organising Tools

Security

Messaging

Monetisation

Visualisation

Prediction

Project Ideas - looking for people

Domain Names

Misc

Non UK projects - Worth taking ideas from

Projects (add missing ones!)

Election Results & Analysis

Live map of election results in London

www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/who-runs-london/general-election/2019 - also available as an embeddable map, contact [email protected]

ERS Election Results Hub

http://ge2019.electoral-reform.org.uk/ Election results UK wide, regions and nations and constituency level

Triangle plot of election results

https://drive.google.com/file/d/127SY1at9oEc-wD-fJqHqtg6HXrO-Tidm/view?usp=sharing - plot of Con v Lab v LD (England only) - [email protected] or @sjorford on Democracy Club Slack

Free live-updating embeddable visualisations of election results

https://flourish.studio/2019/11/26/charts-for-the-uk-elections-2019/ from Flourish - these are based on the live results collection done by Democracy Club volunteers. (You can also see a visualisation of when results were recorded by the top contributing volunteers over election night.)

Data Infrastructure

Democracy Club

democracyclub.org.uk - we are a community that produces useful datasets for UK elections; candidates, polling station locations, hustings, manifestos, and more! If you want to help out, join us on slack.democracyclub.org.uk and check out democracyclub.org.uk/quests

mySociety

mysociety.org - we are a not-for-profit social enterprise that provides technology, research and data to help people to be active citizens, including:

* theyworkforyou.com A tool to check any MP’s recent voting records[a] as well as their historical voting archive. registered interests, appearances and full profile information. API at https://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/.

* writetothem.com helps you identify your representative and contact them — and offers a ‘write to your MP’ interface that can be added to any website.

* mapit.mysociety.org is an API service which matches geographic points to constituencies - ideal for showing your users who their MP is.

Policy Tracker

policytracker.org.uk - tracks progress on all of the government’s manifesto promises, includes explainers and ways to get more involved. @ukpolicytracker.

https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/blog/2019-wrap-up-good-result-for-vfp-bad-result-for-democracy

TwittElection

twittelection.co.uk - we’re creating 650 Twitter lists, each of which will contain the candidates for a constituency (using Democracy Club data to build these lists). Allowing people to easily follow the candidates.

Tweet your Candidate

tweetyourCandidate.com - postcode lookup to find list of candidates social media accounts - includes option for pre-filled tweet campaigns and lists previous MP and their majority.

PoliMonitor

https://www.polimonitor.com/ - PoliMonitor tracks all 10,000+ Parliamentarians in Europe - and hopefully soon all the 5,000+ in North America - as well as 15,000+ UK Journalists. fWe also added lists of around 2,000+ candidates for the 2017 GE and also the European Parliament election this year to our system (that was 4 months of research!) This means anyone can search what candidates have said over the past few and get a free alert each day if they talk about areas of interest. A useful campaign tool during an election, if you’re trying to get GE candidates to make a pledge on a certain issue. Visit the site to create a free account, a free alert, and also start a free trial of our premium tools. Or email [email protected] if you have a question, idea or would like to work with us. We hope to have completed our GE Candidate research by 12th November. Please get in touch if you’d like access to it to create other tools and services or conduct research. UPDATE - We have 1133 Candidate Handles so far.

Open Access

https://openaccess.transparency.org.uk/ Who is meeting government, when and for what purpose? Search by Minister, Department, organisation and more. Data from UK Gov website and up-to-date with Q2 2019, downloadable in CSV format.

Who’s Lobbying

http://whoslobbying.com/ - Who's Lobbying is a place to access data about lobbying activity in the UK without having to navigate; dense, difficult-to-navigate websites and hard to find PDF documents.

Members Interests

http://www.membersinterests.org.uk

Vote for Policies

https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/ Non partisan website that shows policies and gives information on which parties best match your policy preferences. Party’s policies are presented anonymously.

https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/blog/2019-wrap-up-good-result-for-vfp-bad-result-for-democracy

Many more data projects like this at electiontechhandbook.uk/data

Voter Registration & Turnout

Voter Registration Performance Statistics

https://www.gov.uk/performance/register-to-vote - How many people have registered to vote today? Official stats from gov.uk

Votey McVoteFace

https://mcvoteface.org.uk - Just 2% of boaters are registered to vote. Voter registration tool for boaters suggesting where and how to register to vote, in order to vote most effectively against Conservative candidates in marginals, based on location.

Puppy.Rodeo

https://puppy.rodeo/ - There's no time for a puppy rodeo, but there is time to register to vote!

‪Votebot.uk

https://votebot.uk/- facebook chat bot that helps you register to vote and encourage friends to register and vote

Apply to vote by post

https://www.onlinepostalvote.uk/ - General tool. Currently in beta

https://www.postalvote.labour.org.uk - Tool to walk through registering for a postal vote, run by the Labour Party.

https://www.postalvote.conservatives.com - Tool to walk through registering for a postal vote, run by the Conservative Party.

Vote Tracker

https://votetracker.co.uk/index.html - track how many people have registered to vote across different electoral cycles

VoteReminder

https://votereminder.uk/ - a simple way to add a calendarndex.html - trac invite / reminder to your Apple, Google, Yahoo! or Outlook calendar. Uses Democracy Club data where available to include polling station location based on postcode.

VoteEarly

http://www.voteearly.org.uk - A rebranding of postal voting. Why spend time queuing up on the day when you could vote early? Non partisan - can be used by any organisation. Facebook Ads/ messaging/ assets to promote are here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17BFbhhOwrYy61Qq4CNqke8HqxSd0ylCm8I8ao_oIpGE/edit?usp=sharing

Everyone.Vote

https://www.everyone.vote - a printable poster to help people register to vote.

Teachers for Turnout

https://www.teachersforturnout.org.uk/ Inspired by the US campaign a website with information and resources to help teachers and lecturers help their students to turnout and vote. Non-partisan.

Democracy Club Research: Who’s Missing? (2018)

https://democracyclub.org.uk/reports/whos_missing/ or Google Doc version for comments

An overview of existing research on underrepresentation in voter registration, candidacy, informedness and turnout.

See also 2016 blog posts on voter registration and young people: who? what works? and what could be done differently?

House of Commons Library Research: Political disengagement in the UK: who is disengaged? (2019)

https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7501

This Commons Library Briefing Paper provides information about which groups in the UK are considered to be politically disengaged, and why. The Commons Library is a great source for lots of election-related desk research!

Webroots Democracy Research: Online Voting

https://webrootsdemocracy.org/online-voting/ - Our research has found that a