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

Since March, I've been in Sydney, working as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Electoral Integrity Project. While in Australia I've been presenting draft material from a forthcoming book on Comparative Electoral Management.  Having presented at ANU and Canberra over the past few weeks, this week I presented in Sydney. Two draft chapters can…Read more Comparative Electoral Management – draft chapters

Calling all electoral officials in England! Alistair Clark and I are running a survey of the 2018 local election poll workers. Email invitations have been sent directly to all Returning Officers. Please look out for the email invitations get in touch with any questions. For more info: http://www.electoralmanagement.com/2018-english-local-elections-survey/

The English local elections of 2018 are just behind us.  Turnout, as is usual, was low. Next time around universities will have a statutory role to play in getting their students registered to vote.  But they need not wait. Here's a short piece on this for HE Fortnightly. Universities face new directions from the Office…Read more How universities can encourage their students to vote

The Scottish government published an exciting document making proposals for electoral reform in December 2017.  The Scottish Parliament recently gained new powers over the conduct of Scottish Parliamentary elections and electoral registration and already has devolved responsibility for local government elections. Earlier in 2018, I was kindly invited to speak at an event organised by…Read more Electoral Modernisation in Scotland

Many academics around the globe, driven by a desire to use their accumulated expertise to improve the world, have long sought to achieve what is now known within higher education management as ‘impact’.  A new surge of activity, however, has arguably been unleashed in some countries in recent years.  Universities and academics have been pressured…Read more The Higher Education Impact Agenda and Policy Change

The Scottish government published an ambitious programme for reforming elections this week, which should be carefully read by everyone interested in elections across the UK. The one aspect (among many, many, many other important ones...) to catch the press was the proposal to trial electronic voting methods, such as internet voting. Here is a quick…Read more Scotland eyes online voting: here are some tips from past pilots