Nearly all countries around the world now hold elections at some level, but the quality of those elections often vary. Although there have been many volumes on the role and effects of electoral systems and other aspects of the election, the process of managing the election is often overlooked. In a special issue of International…Read more The new international research agenda studying electoral management

Three years ago, the Law Commission published an important report proposing the consolidation of electoral law across the UK. This is yet to be taken forward by the government. It was therefore good news that the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee recently launched an inquiry asking how urgent these reforms were, whether they government had…Read more Electoral Law Inquiry

#DeniedMyVote trended on Twitter in the UK yesterday, as many people faced problems casting their vote in the European Parliamentary elections. The focus was often on the poll workers who were the bearers of bad news to EU citizens that their name had been crossed off the register - because they had not completed the…Read more The causes of #DeniedMyVote

Having been a Game of Throne addict for past however many years, I couldn't resist using some of the concepts from leadership theory that I've been working on to write a short blog.. Warning: this contains spoilers for Game of Thrones, series eight. Alongside many other aspects of the final series of Game of Thrones,…Read more Game of Thrones and Political Leadership Theory

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