How good is your council website for election results?

[Deleted]

I thought it might be a good idea if as many of us as possible could report back on how good (or bad) our local council websites are for election results. If by some miracle James Doyle's idea of setting up a Psephological Society to lobby councils for better information does ever take off, it would be nice to have an idea what the nearest thing to perfection should be.

Here is some criteria:
Are the results easy to find with a simple search?
Are results for previous years provided, and if so, how far back do they go?
Are all the results for this year on one web page or do you have to click on a separate link for each ward result?
Is there a summary of results including a ward by ward summary, aggregate council-wide votes, percentages with two decimal places, a pie chart, the current composition of the council, and a detailed ward map?

Is there anything else we should expect from council websites in terms of election results information? What are the best and worst council websites?


I'll kick off with the one for Bradford:

democracy.bradford.gov.uk/mgElectionElectionAreaResults.aspx?EID=30&RPID=1505611

Its results are easy to find with a simple search.
The results on display date back five years, to 2011.
You have to click on separate links to get each ward result.
There is a summary of results including a ward by ward summary. Aggregate council-wide votes are provided. Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number. Pie charts for each ward are included. There is no ward map.

Overall, I'd give it 7 out of 10.

[Lord Twaddleford]

For recent and a few major results (Westminster, Assembly, Local Council elections), the Conwy County Borough Council has a decent-ish list, but to find older results for more minor elections (e.g. by-elections to the County Council or Town/Community Councils), you're going to have do a bit of extra digging. For the most part they keep the older stuff up, but they don't make it easy to access.

I'd give it 6, maybe a 7 if I'm feeling generous.

[Jack]

web.walsall.gov.uk/elections/

It looks a bit amateurish and only has the latest results, but it does the job.

[timrollpickering]

Newham has a page with them on with pages for recent ones and spreadsheets for older ones going back to 1964. There are some omissions - the Newham South by-election of 1974 is missing, the 1964 council results are just summaries and the Aldermen get forgotten earlier than they should - but all in all it's pretty good.

www.newham.gov.uk/Pages/Services/Election-results.aspx

[andrewteale]

Here's a truly appalling effort from Nottingham council:

www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/about-the-council/voting-elections/election-results/

Not only do the 2015 links go to a flash-ridden page which is impossible to save or download, but for the 2011 results they suggest you go to Wikipedia.

[Harry Hayfield]

Ceredigion is actually pretty good. The local election pages go back to 1999 (and mentions by-elections) and when it comes to listing nominations they do them all in one section.

[Lord Twaddleford]

Jun 7, 2016 21:31:28 GMT Lord Twaddleford said:

For recent and a few major results (Westminster, Assembly, Local Council elections), the Conwy County Borough Council has a decent-ish list, but to find older results for more minor elections (e.g. by-elections to the County Council or Town/Community Councils), you're going to have do a bit of extra digging. For the most part they keep the older stuff up, but they don't make it easy to access.

I'd give it 6, maybe a 7 if I'm feeling generous.

Returning to this, whilst main elections from 2008 onwards are well documented, recently they've become a bit slack in archiving by election results, to find the results for the Mostyn and most recent Abergele-Pensarn by-elections, one needs to dig down into the press release listings.

[AdminSTB]

I'm glad to see this thread has been revived. It would be good to see how a few more of you would rate your council website for election results information.

[peterl]

Bournemouth Council

Are the results easy to find with a simple search?

Yes

Are results for previous years provided, and if so, how far back do they go?

Used to be, but today I could find nothing from before 2015 (unless its well buried)

Are all the results for this year on one web page or do you have to click on a separate link for each ward result?

Separate links.

Is there a summary of results including a ward by ward summary, aggregate council-wide votes, percentages with two decimal places, a pie chart, the current composition of the council, and a detailed ward map?

There is a list of the current composition and who controls the council, otherwise no. They did this a lot better with an interactive map for 2011, which doesn't seem to be available any more.

Overall, okay but not great for the last 18 months, anything before that non existent. 5 out of 10, mainly due to lack of past results.

[Foggy]

Sedgemoor

Are the results easy to find with a simple search?

Yes, and alternatively they're only two clicks away from the website front page if you know where you're looking. (Homepage --> 'The Council' --> 'Elections and Voting')

Are results for previous years provided, and if so, how far back do they go?

Yes, with one further click. All district and parish results back to 2003, plus by-elections. County Council and European Parliament results only go back to 2009. The links to the PDFs (which open in a separate window rather than as a download) do not appear to be listed in any particular order or be subject to any particular house style for naming them – even though the same Chief Electoral Officer has been in charge for years. The GE result is given just for 2010... and then only for one of the seats that overlaps with this local authority area. Those of us in the northern part of the district are in Wells constituency and feel quite left out by this Bridgwater-centric attitude.

Are all the results for this year on one web page or do you have to click on a separate link for each ward result?

You only have to do that for by-elections. All-out elections have the wards listed in alphabetical order in a PDF. For older elections this looks like a scan of the Returning Officer's notice. For newer ones they have been collated to make them slightly easier on the eye, but elected candidates are listed in bold (since they are still in the alphabetical order in which they appeared on the ballot paper) rather than placed at the top of the list.

Is there a summary of results including a ward by ward summary, aggregate council-wide votes, percentages with two decimal places, a pie chart, the current composition of the council, and a detailed ward map?

There are certainly none of those things. I can't locate a ward-by-ward summary or a party political ward map. There must have been a blank map of the old ward boundaries at some point, because one hung on my bedroom wall in my late teens whilst I was studying AS level Politics!   The composition of the Council immediately following the last district-level election is located right at the top of the elections page.

There is a "scheduled by-elections" page which hasn't been updated in over a year. Then again, it hasn't needed to be.
All information on the EU referendum is written as if it's happening in the future.
Same goes for last May's PCC election, except that there are at least links to the result further down the page.
The 2015 GE page (which as previously mentioned, doesn't contain the result) again acts as if Bridgwater & West Somerset is the only constituency covering the area.
There is a neat "Future Elections" calendar in list format on the Voting page, which goes right up to 2024... when it still thinks we'll be voting in EP elections.

[ColinJ]

This is probably the 'best' thread to post this interesting story. For many years accessing electoral information on the Watford Council website has been a nightmare..... non-intuitive layouts and unnecessary multiple 'clicking events' to get to the story or information of interest.

The Watford Observer has just published an intriguing story that Watford Council homepage has the worst carbon emissions of 400+ local authorities surveyed:

www.watfordobserver.co.uk/news/19845919.watford-council-homepage-producing-carbon-emissions-council/

So, we have in this homepage league of shame:

1. Watford..... 13g of carbon per visit
2. Redcar and Cleveland..... 7.47g of carbon per visit

Average in the survey:

1.28g of carbon per visit

Watford claims to have a completely redesigned site, introduced in November, but even that new homepage topped the survey at 10.26g per visit.

A cursory look at the redesigned site does seem to result in much easier access to previous election data. I wonder if others who hated the old site (paging Pete Whitehead ) agree.

[Pete Whitehead]

Yes it's a huge improvment. Naturally I don't give a fuck about how many carbon emissions are involved but the info on past election results is presented in an infinitely better form than previously. It remains to be seen how they perform at uploading SOPNs etc at the next set of elections.
Unfortuantely as Watford has seen this huge improvement, the quality of the St Albans site has deteriorated with it now showing only a fraction of the past election results that it used to (not a problem for me in terms of borough or county elections where I have other sources but a sad loss in terms of parish council results.) This I think is down to a regime change in Electoral services department itself I think as they also became noiceably sluggish at uploading SOPNs (where previously they would be up within about half an hour of close of nominations).
Most of the council websites in Hertfordshire are fairly shit in one way or another. Watford may be one of the better ones now having been a contender for worst

[Crimson King]

Jan 14, 2022 8:34:48 GMT ColinJ said:

This is probably the 'best' thread to post this interesting story. For many years accessing electoral information on the Watford Council website has been a nightmare..... non-intuitive layouts and unnecessary multiple 'clicking events' to get to the story or information of interest.

The Watford Observer has just published an intriguing story that Watford Council homepage has the worst carbon emissions of 400+ local authorities surveyed:

www.watfordobserver.co.uk/news/19845919.watford-council-homepage-producing-carbon-emissions-council/

So, we have in this homepage league of shame:

1. Watford..... 13g of carbon per visit
2. Redcar and Cleveland..... 7.47g of carbon per visit

Average in the survey:

1.28g of carbon per visit

Watford claims to have a completely redesigned site, introduced in November, but even that new homepage topped the survey at 10.26g per visit.

A cursory look at the redesigned site does seem to result in much easier access to previous election data. I wonder if others who hated the old site (paging Pete Whitehead ) agree.

Just a thought, if the website is so rubbish perhaps no one bothers to visit, meaning that (presuming the carbon costs of hosting a site are much the same for everyone) costs per visit are higher

[greenchristian]

Jan 14, 2022 9:06:24 GMT Crimson King said:

Jan 14, 2022 8:34:48 GMT ColinJ said:

This is probably the 'best' thread to post this interesting story. For many years accessing electoral information on the Watford Council website has been a nightmare..... non-intuitive layouts and unnecessary multiple 'clicking events' to get to the story or information of interest.

The Watford Observer has just published an intriguing story that Watford Council homepage has the worst carbon emissions of 400+ local authorities surveyed:

www.watfordobserver.co.uk/news/19845919.watford-council-homepage-producing-carbon-emissions-council/

So, we have in this homepage league of shame:

1. Watford..... 13g of carbon per visit
2. Redcar and Cleveland..... 7.47g of carbon per visit

Average in the survey:

1.28g of carbon per visit

Watford claims to have a completely redesigned site, introduced in November, but even that new homepage topped the survey at 10.26g per visit.

A cursory look at the redesigned site does seem to result in much easier access to previous election data. I wonder if others who hated the old site (paging Pete Whitehead ) agree.

Just a thought, if the website is so rubbish perhaps no one bothers to visit, meaning that (presuming the carbon costs of hosting a site are much the same for everyone) costs per visit are higher

The fixed carbon costs aren't very likely to be the same for everyone. The fixed carbon costs of having a server running 24/7 are smaller if the site is on shared hosting than if it has its own dedicated server.  There are also additional carbon costs associated with more complicated backend systems and larger file sizes, since the more data the server has to process and serve the more energy it has to use. All else being equal, a site that requires navigating a lot of pages to get what you're after will have higher emissions than one that doesn't, as will a site that serves up a lot of multimedia files compared to one that doesn't. Without being familiar with either of these two sites I'd guess that they are difficult to navigate, do a lot of server-side processing, contain lots of graphics-heavy pages, and that that there more people than average who watch video of their full council meetings that is hosted on their server (since I assume that video hosted somewhere like YouTube wouldn't be counted in these figures).

[andrewteale]

Jan 14, 2022 22:08:18 GMT greenchristian said:

Jan 14, 2022 9:06:24 GMT Crimson King said:

Just a thought, if the website is so rubbish perhaps no one bothers to visit, meaning that (presuming the carbon costs of hosting a site are much the same for everyone) costs per visit are higher

The fixed carbon costs aren't very likely to be the same for everyone. The fixed carbon costs of having a server running 24/7 are smaller if the site is on shared hosting than if it has its own dedicated server.  There are also additional carbon costs associated with more complicated backend systems and larger file sizes, since the more data the server has to process and serve the more energy it has to use. All else being equal, a site that requires navigating a lot of pages to get what you're after will have higher emissions than one that doesn't, as will a site that serves up a lot of multimedia files compared to one that doesn't. Without being familiar with either of these two sites I'd guess that they are difficult to navigate, do a lot of server-side processing, contain lots of graphics-heavy pages, and that that there more people than average who watch video of their full council meetings that is hosted on their server (since I assume that video hosted somewhere like YouTube wouldn't be counted in these figures).

Seems reasonable, although I'm not sure how you would quantify the amount of server-side processing required from the resulting webpage.

I just tried their calculator on the LEAP front page, which is extremely lightweight and stripped-down by today's web standards (5 images, 2 stylesheets, no scripts or ads, 78kB total transfer): it weighed in at 0.04 grams of carbon. LEAP has shared hosting, but interestingly the calculator marked my hosting company down for not using sustainable energy.

This page (40 HTTP requests, around 1MB total transfer) came in at 0.94 grams.

[Harry Hayfield]

Ceredigion is so so. Very good after the event, terrible during the event.

[No Offence Alan]

For past results, Worcestershire is very good:
gis.worcestershire.gov.uk/website/Elections/results.aspx
I hope Worcestershire manages to avoid unitarisation.

[John Chanin]

Jan 15, 2022 17:12:36 GMT No Offence Alan said:

For past results, Worcestershire is very good:
gis.worcestershire.gov.uk/website/Elections/results.aspx
I hope Worcestershire manages to avoid unitarisation.

Little chance of that, although it would probably be divided into 2 unitaries.  Wychavon’s shape would however cause some difficulty - Droitwich belongs with Bromsgrove and Kidderminster, while Evesham and Pershore belong with Malvern and Worcester.

Perhaps we could donate Redditch to Warwickshire?

[Pete Whitehead]

Tower Hamlets has got its SOPNs up but individual links to Word documents that run to several pages...

[peterl]

Dorset Council

Are the results easy to find with a simple search?

Yes, both with a search and browsing from the home page.

Are results for previous years provided, and if so, how far back do they go?

You can go back as far as the 2019 elections, so nothing for the predecessor councils is available.

Are all the results for this year on one web page or do you have to click on a separate link for each ward result?

All on a single page.

Is there a summary of results including a ward by ward summary, aggregate council-wide votes, percentages with two decimal places, a pie chart, the current composition of the council, and a detailed ward map?

There is a summary using a clickable map. There is a current composition of the council in text, table and pie chart form. Aggregate council-wide votes are not given in either numbers or percent.

So in summary pretty good for recent elections, but doesn't go back very far. They are also not great at updating the website on the night when there are by elections.