Constituency boundaries at the next election
Constituency boundaries are changing at the next general election in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. After some amount of fiddling (I’ll go into technical details in another post, but it wasn’t as easy as just importing some shapefiles), as a slightly early Christmas present, TheyWorkForYou now has a section where you can enter your postcode to find out what constituency you are currently in, and what constituency you will be voting in at the election, along with maps of before and after:
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/boundaries/
This service is also available through the TheyWorkForYou API. This is a facility we have been asked for frequently, more so as we approach the forthcoming election; the large amount of boundary changes have led to confusion from our users and elsewhere, so this will hopefully prove useful.
One site that will need the boundaries before the election is DemocracyClub – join to help make this coming election the most transparent ever!
Side effects of the above process include updated council boundaries, so those councils on WriteToThem that we’ve had switched off since May due to lack of boundary data are now back; a more up-to-date postcode dataset; and the beginnings of parish council support (as in they’re now in the database, but the front-end doesn’t know what to do with them yet).
I hope you all have a happy Christmas and New Year.
Re Democracy Club – I’m kind of wondering what is the point of keeping pushing it? I registered a few weeks ago now but haven’t heard a dicky-bird (other than confirmation of my registration).
My “buy in” interest is on the wane…
I think it’s like HearFromYourMP – you sign up but don’t need to worry/think about it until you get an email (at which point you can be interested again, or not). DemocracyClub would obviously like to cover all constituencies to be of best use, and it’s still got a few to go.