Using open data to understand voter registration levels

With an election coming up, thoughts turn to registering to vote; campaigns at all levels will start encouraging people to register and participate.

From an open data perspective, the we want to know what could be learnt about electoral registration from the data held locally or in national sources and could it be used to help increase registration levels?

A sub-set of that question was then ‘how can we understand which areas have higher or lower levels of registration in Bath and North East Somerset?’.

This post intends to show it is possible (and reasonably easy) for anyone to run a quick analysis to answer these questions, provided the local authority is willing and able to release some electoral registration statistics.

We were able to achieve this to a small geographical level and publish some findings reasonably easily and it should be easy for any local area to repeat this.

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