Election Tech Roundup #1 – Our next event, project updates, and new things in the handbook
What's happening with election tech?
Our next Election Tech Meetup: Learning from the Locals is coming together nicely.
Harriet Andrews will talk about the work of Democracy Classroom, a shared hub of resources, training opportunities and events geared towards getting young people engaged in elections.
Climate Emergency UK will present their project Council Climate Scorecards, an assessment of all UK councils based on the actions they've taken towards net zero.
More speakers announced soon. If you want to present a project, get in touch.
RSVP: https://lu.ma/electiontechmeetup3
Project Updates
Democracy Club have finished their heroic Candidates Database effort: https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk/
The database contains a wealth of information about candidates for UK elections in some 2,015 areas.
It’s really a huge task to draw together information about candidates.
But why isn’t it made by, say, the Electoral Commission? As Democracy Club explain:
Elections in the UK are run on a local level by individual councils. This means that the state does not collect a central list of candidates in a given election. This site aims to fill that gap. Hundreds of brilliant volunteers, like you, come together to make this data available.
Congratulations to Democracy Club and thank you to everyone listed on its Democracy Heroes leaderboard.
Open Access has been updated
https://openaccess.transparency.org.uk/
The most useful dashboard for tracking the murky world of political lobbying has had a new tranche of data added. Here you can see who has been lobbying MPs and which MPs have been most open to hosting. Kwasi Kwarteng has been busy!
The Local Intelligence Hub have added more local data
https://www.mysociety.org/2024/04/25/were-putting-more-local-into-the-local-intelligence-hub/
The Local Intelligence Hub is a project that gathers and displays essential information for climate campaigners about all areas of the UK.
(mySociety gave a brilliant demo of the Hub at our previous election tech meetup, sign up for our next one here: https://lu.ma/electiontechmeetup3)
They’ve now updated it to let you explore data at the local council level. With this new data they note you could:
Build a profile of your local council
Design a national campaign strategy
Visualise your goals
For example, you can construct a filter that shows you councils that have declared a climate emergency but haven’t published a climate action plan – ripe for action.
Unmasking Deception
https://ace.blog.gov.uk/2024/04/16/unmasking-deception-join-the-deepfake-detection-challenge/
Deepfakes (images and videos made with artificial neural networks that can show people doing things they never have) are a threat to many civic organisations – they can erode trust and spread disinformation.
To counter this threat, The Home Office, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE) are now running at Deepfakes Detection Challenge.
The event takes place on the 1st May.
You can sign up here:
Whether or not deepfakes will play a decisive role in this election is controversial view. Read our previous edition of this newsletter for a sceptical take by Sam Jeffers on the dangers of deepfakes in the 2024 election here:
And, on a similar note, Fenimore Harper released a ‘red team’ report on deepfakes
They found that 1,200 ‘deep-fake’ misinformation short form clips (over 10 hours of content) can be created within an hour for £100 – and the price is dropping constantly.
You can find this and many other projects like it in the Library section of the Handbook: https://electiontechhandbook2024.uk/library
New in the handbook
We’ve added a bunch more projects to the handbook:
2024 AI Elections Tracker
https://restofworld.org/2024/elections-ai-tracker/
Continuing with the deepfake theme: throughout 2024, Rest of World is tracking the most noteworthy incidents of AI-generated election content globally.
As Sam Jeffers noted in our interview for us, people in the UK are likely to have very strong beliefs already about our political parties that are not easily dislodged by a single moment of deepfake shenanigans.
This isn’t the case everywhere.
Many other countries have lower levels of digital literacy and higher levels of political organisational churn, meaning that new contenders, about whom people have less established beliefs, can utilise deepfakes more effectively. And in a globalised world, these techniques never stop at borders.
You can submit your own examples to the project.
Turbo Phonebank
Turbo phonebank is an extremely useful project for campaigners that turns any Google Sheet into a phonebank or textbank. That’s a crucial timesaver in any GOTV campaign.
Then, you can record how the conversation went back into the sheet.
Overton.io
Is your research having impact? Overton offers a searchable index of policy documents, guidelines, think tank publications and working papers from 188 countries. Lets researchers, universities, and think tanks understand the policy reach of their research.
Personally, I would love to see more robust and innovate tools for assessing the impact of campaigners – you can put the tools and research you know of in the Link Drop section of the Handbook: https://electiontechhandbook2024.uk/
Wikipedia traffic data and electoral prediction: towards theoretically informed models
https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.01818
Here’s an interesting question: could you use Wikipedia as an election prediction engine?
One of the more intriguing pieces of research that has found its way into the Handbook, this paper argues that Wikipedia traffic, read correctly, offers “good information about changes in both overall turnout at elections and in vote share for particular parties.”
When might we see this method influence some of the more standard techniques like polling and prediction markets?
Check out other tools for divining the future in the 🔮 Prediction 🔮 section of the Handbook: https://electiontechhandbook2024.uk/
See you at our next event, 7th May 2024, Newspeak House
RSVP: https://lu.ma/electiontechmeetup3
Harriet Andrews will talk about the work of Democracy Classroom, a shared hub of resources, training opportunities and events geared towards getting young people engaged in elections.
Climate Emergency UK will present their project Council Climate Scorecards, an assessment of all UK councils based on the actions they've taken towards net zero.
More speakers announced soon. If you want to present a project, get in touch.