Councillor Information (prospective and elected)

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Posted in Proposals 2006

Author: Tom Raggett

What NEED does this meet?

I have used postal voting for council elections in the hope that it would prompt me to check out each and every name on the ballot, rather than voting solely along party lines (or on who actually lives in my ward).

I have tried to check out councillor and prospective candidate information, and there is little easily available on the internet.

I would like to be able to make a more informed decision.

What is the APPROACH?

Use the “Hear from your MP” approach to send prospective candidates (and/or the relevant council and political party) “We want to know more” messages. They can then respond with links to the relevant website or statement. There is a verification / validation issue, but I believe it is solvable.

It will take some time, but the candidates will get the message that they have an obvious and necessary channel to engaged voters that doesn’t involve turning up on the doorstep.

What are the BENEFITS to people?

This will benefit those voters who want more information about council elections.

It will help to raise participation levels (only 25% in some London boroughs).

It will increase the ability of independent candidates to compete in local elections.

What is the COMPETITION?

There are services for elected councillors, but none for prospective candidates.

http://www.councillorsuk.co.uk/councillors.asp
http://www.councillor.gov.uk/

And a “vote against Iraq” option

Home

What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

The councillor system could use parts of the same infrastructure as Hear From Your MP / Write to Them.

Volume of councillors is large – 21,000 in England and Wales (plus 10,000 parish councils, if you’re tempted).

There are issues with verifying that the right candidate / councillor can write out to the relevant list, as well as getting messages to the candidates (who won’t all have email or fax, necessarily). I’m guessing that the local council and political party(ies) will have the candidate information, so the system can use these as a driver.

My thinking is that a max-once a day email limit and report abuse of the system option will help control parties / candidates who think this could be used for spam.

5 Comments

  1. HI,

    http://www.electionmemory.com/

    This site that Richard Pope put together answers some of these points, well at least for Lambeth. We hoped to do a couple more authorities for this election but didn’t get around to it, but hopefully we will get the model going to act as an archive and point of comment and information for all elections and candidates.

    Mark.

  2. Mark,

    That looks like an excellent start.

    Usual mySoc style questions.

    1) cost (build and hosting)
    2) ease of replication / scalability to other wards (e.g. can I do one for Hillrise in Islington? Over this weekend?)
    3) how to push / pull / coerce the parties to put more information up (on their sites as well as the core)
    4) how have you publicised it
    5) Lessons learned (I guess after the elections…)

    Tom

  3. Hi Tom,

    1) currently $1 (to buy the ballot box logo)

    2) Since this was a rush job it isnt setup to deal with other boroughs so you would need to setup your own site. Either a single wordpress install would do the job (I can give you the hacked version I have put together if you can make any use/sense of it), or you could always setup a blogger account for each manifesto?

    The main effort here is getting the manifestos and candidates into a database. Since you have limeted time I would suggest doing it in large chunks – 4 paragraphs at a time. Any maybe dont worry about the candidates?

    3) Parties have all semmed very willing (candidates keep on searching for them selves : ). They gave us early copies of their manifestos, email addresses etc.

    But I’ve been trailing this with some of them for a few months, so that made things easier. Longer term sites like this need a way for parties to upload their own manifestos in a set format.

    4) Badly! Really need some help here if anyone has any suggestions

    5) have to wait and see.

    Email team@electionmemory.com if you want to talk about it.

    Richard

  4. Another more doable-in-a-weekend idea for you, what about emailing all the candidates in your ward and asking them for a personal statement (400 words max) about what they are going to do if you vote for them. You can put that in a blog along with their party info?