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Election Observation is all year round not just on May 2nd…
Some of our Northern Ireland team visiting the Stormont Parliament building before observing across all 11 councils
Our observers have been returning home from across the UK, and beyond, from their observations of the local elections in England and Northern Ireland. May is always the peak month of activity in the year for Democracy Volunteers with the largest round of elections traditionally being in the first week.
The second round of Voter ID trials have once again seen a large deployment by Democracy Volunteers, seeing some 50+ observers attending polling stations in the councils we observed. In Northern Ireland, we deployed a team of 26 (as well as support staff) and visited almost a quarter of all polling stations in the province. The final results of these observations, in each case, will be available in the near future on the Democracy Volunteers website.
However, 2019 is a particularly challenging electoral year for election observation in the UK, as we continue to predict which elections and/or referendums might appear on the electoral calendar. Two of these elections, which we will now observe, are the European Parliamentary elections, which will be held on 23rd May in the UK, and the Peterborough Parliamentary By-election which will be on 6th June. Other elections continue to be possible.
As such four of our young observers have all agreed to run the Manchester 10k on May 19th to raise funds for Democracy Volunteers to finance our observation of the European Elections in the UK on May 23rd. With your help we can ensure that we deliver a serious deployment across the UK and continue to keep our work free to observe in the UK.
Derby saw our largest deployment of observers in England with observations across the council lasting more than an hour in each case.
'The more we observe UK elections, through polling station election observation, the more it becomes clear to us that our work is valuable to both the election authorities and the public. By supporting our work we can make sure that election observation continues all year round in the UK to maintain and improve the quality of UK elections.'
You can support the four runners, on their JustGiving page, HERE.
John Ault is Director of Democracy Volunteers
Overseas Advanced Voting for Finland's Parliamentary Elections
My first election observation