What is Medway Elects?

Next year’s local elections will mark eight years since I launched Medway Elects.

In that time, Medway will have seen three local election cycles (and seven by-elections), three general elections, two police and crime commissioner elections, one European election and one referendum.

I was asked recently how I would describe it, and the only answer I could give was that Medway Elects is a passion project. It was born out of a frustration, as a local political nerd, that trying to find election information on Medway council’s own website was nothing short of a nightmare.

At the time, their website was disjointed, and while improvements have been made in the years since, it still is. Election results are buried within layers of pages and there is no way of seeing an individual councillor’s election history, attendance or allowance data without manually cycling through tens or even hundreds of pages and PDF or Word document downloads.

Some of the information isn’t even on their website – instead, I’ve had to resort to FOI requests to build Medway Elects. Even then, the council haven’t always had the information. For example, I would love to be able to add parish council election data, but the information held by the council as the authority which administers those elections is incomplete – a fact one helpful visitor alluded to after seeing one of my FOI requests.

So Medway Elects was designed to give people key information in as few clicks as possible. And since 2015, that information has ballooned from mere local election results since 1997 to local elections results as far back as 1974, general election results as far back as 1841, European election results as far back as 1979 and referenda results, as well as allowance, attendance and voting data for councillors and expenses data for members of parliament, all held in an ever-expanding database in the cloud.

One of the advantages of having the information stored in a database – and, indeed, the reason I decided to set it up as a database all those years ago – is because once the data is in there, you can take it out in almost any manner you like.

Take, for example, election results (the main reason most people visit the website). Each candidate’s result is entered into the database as an entry containing their name, party, election, ward, number of votes, etc., which can then be printed on screen as either a table of all results, a snapshot of an individual candidate’s result, a plain text summary of an individual candidate’s electoral history, or any number of designs of chart for one or more wards and for one or more elections – all of which are either live on the website now, or will be when the next update rolls out.

Over Christmas, the legal world traditionally shuts down, so as well as taking a break from work to see friends and family, it is usually when I start to work in earnest on new ideas for Medway Elects. This year is no different, when I will be working on plain text summaries for as many pages as possible, to give visitors a useful snapshot of the data before they flick through it.

Though that work is likely to take some time to fully complete, I am always open to others’ ideas for new features – feel free to drop me an email on alan@medwayelects.co.uk.

Oh, and don’t forget to visit Medway Elects at medwayelects.co.uk! I may be slightly biased, but it is a treasure trove of data!