After nearly a hundred years without serious modification, the Victorian system of electoral registration in Britain was radically reformed by the Coalition government from 2014, as a new online system of electoral registration was introduced. Not only that, registration was switched to be on an individual basis. And you had to provide your national insurance…Read more Good news: automatic re-registration may be on the way

It’s been a chaotic week in Parliament this week following the announcement of a proposed deal between the UK and EU for the UK’s withdrawal.  And yet we can expect much more in the weeks ahead of the Commons vote. In advance of this, I noticed that Number Ten Downing Street is placing adverts on…Read more Should Number Ten pay Twitter to promote Brexit?

The London School of Economics Press has published a new book on The UK's Changing Democracy today.   My chapter on Are UK elections conducted with integrity, with sufficient turnout? is free to download along with the rest of the book.  Enjoy!

Last week, I was one of the co-chairs (with Holly Ann Garnett) of the conference on '“Building Better Elections: New Challenges in Electoral Management', held at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA, last week. The workshop considered how elections could be better run during times when electoral officials face major new challenges…Read more The Boston Building Better Elections Workshop

How well run are UK elections?  As part of the 2018 Democratic Audit, I look at how well elections are run in the UK, and whether the systems for registering voters and encouraging turnout are operating effectively and fairly.  My audit has just been published on the Democratic Audit website. The headlines are that UK elections…Read more An Audit of UK Electoral Integrity – 2018

The UK government introduced pilots for voter ID at the recent 2018 English local elections.  There is an ongoing debate about the need for voter ID in Britain.  In a  study of electoral integrity at English local elections Alistair Clark and I undertook a poll worker survey - a well established tool to work how…Read more Voter ID: our first results suggest local election pilot was unnecessary and ineffective

It was a great honour to be a finalist in the ESRC Impact Awards last month.  An even greater honour was to receive a silver medal from former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Find out more about the work on the ESRC website, or watch this video below, which profiles the UEA collaboration with Bite…Read more UEA Impact Recognised by ESRC