Electoral Engagement

In 2018, I led a project with the Cabinet Office's Democratic Engagement team to understand the barrier to electoral registration for people with no-fixed abode and frequent movers. 

At the time, this was the Lab's largest ever project and was the first time I had the chance to apply multi-sided video ethnography (18 participants), prototyping and user testing in the same project. We had a fantastic commissioning team and stakeholders including Local Authorities the Electoral Commission, Charities like St. Mungo's and the YMCA. 

The key challenge for this project was stewarding a system of actors towards new practices as the CO had limited policy levers - they largely sat in each local authority that have their own systems and processes. This is why we made all our research available online, including for a time-limited time our video ethnography which was accessed by 60 LAs. 

One of the most interesting aspects of the research was getting to go behind the scenes of the democratic process. We heard how LA election teams grew from teams of 3-4 to hundreds during an election period, in some cases a similar size to the number of people employed by the LA itself. We also heard how, since the EU referendum of 2016, many young election officers had run the same number of elections as someone in their mid-career!

Andrea Siodmok, the then Deputy Director of Policy Lab, wrote a piece about the project for the Local Government Chronicle shortly after local council elections titled: Electoral engagement requires innovation.