General election voters will be able to look up their polling station online

Very welcome news from the latest Electoral Commission bulletin:

In Bulletin 173 we advised that we would again be supporting Democracy Club in their work to provide an online polling station finder and encouraged all councils to provide the necessary polling station data to Democracy Club. This work will allow voters to find their polling station online by entering their postcode. We will soon be adding polling station information to our Your Vote Matters website so that visitors to the site can find out where their polling station is.

We will also be making available a list of candidates standing for election on our Your Vote Matters website. This information is being compiled from the statements of persons nominated published on local authority websites. To find this information, users will need to enter their postcode on the main landing page of the site, and candidates standing for elections in their area will then be listed.

Having one central website where you can enter your address and find out where your polling station is might sound like a simple, obvious step. Which it is – but also one that was elusive for many years because polling station data is split between all the different local councils, and moreover not stored in systems designed to make it simple to export and share such data for combined use.