The challenges of running modern elections: Interview with Laura Lock

This week, we spoke to Laura Lock, Deputy Chief Executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators on the modernisation of elections in England. The AEA represents electoral professionals in the UK, offering training and advice for electoral administrators, alongside representing the interests of the people who run elections. Laura has worked at the AEA for close to nine years, and prior to this worked at two district councils in electoral services, and program management. We asked Laura on her thoughts on the role of electoral administrators, the challenges of running elections, and how we can modernise our elections.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube here.

00:00 Introduction to Electoral Administration
02:56 The Role of Electoral Administrators
05:58 Challenges in Running Elections
09:00 Government’s New Electoral Strategy
15:04 Addressing Abuse of Electoral Administrators
17:46 Blueprint for Modernising Elections

Looking for just the highlights? A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

How did you get involved in running elections and your work for the AEA?

I started in elections 22 years ago, having previously worked for the Open University in event management, which is broadly similar as elections are essentially one big event. I also worked at two district councils in Cambridgeshire in electoral services, which gave me a really good grounding and base knowledge. I then moved in 2016 to the AEA, helping to support members across the UK in delivering their polls.

What exactly do electoral administrators do?

Well, we don’t work one day a year! That’s the common misconception. Broadly, electoral administrators work on two elements. Firstly, electoral registration, which is the less glamorous part of the job. Each summer you’ll have a letter through the door, asking who still resides in the house, or you may even get it via email as we’ve started our modernisation agenda. This makes sure the electoral register is up to date, so when a poll is called, be it a parliamentary election or a parish council by-election, they’ll make sure that everyone who’s eligible is on the electoral register, and that the register also ensures people living overseas can register to vote and vote.

Electoral administrators work extensively with overseas electors, service voters, and anonymous voters whose details are not in the public domain. They also work extensively with students, care homes, frequent movers, and other represented groups to ensure their participation when they want it.

Secondly, and the more high-profile part, is when they’re working on elections. Take your poll card – they will have booked your polling station, and that gets printed onto your poll card, which they will have ordered. They take all the nominations for the poll and they’ll send through the data so we can print ballot papers. They do everything in relation to organising the count and declaring the result. Electoral administrators are very rarely actually on stage reading out the result, but they’re the people who have meant that someone can read it out. We always say that without electoral administrators, we wouldn’t have a government, as we wouldn’t have had elections or we wouldn’t have councils, not to mention other year-round tasks like community governance reviews, neighbourhood planning referendums and other democratic involvements. They’re also experts in information governance, employment law and similar important things.

The AEA has published much on how the electoral landscape has changed in recent years. Can you tell us more?

We had a very static system for a long time. When I joined in 2003, we’d just moved to rolling registration, meaning you could join the register throughout the year. Prior to that, wherever you lived in October, that’s where you were registered to vote for the year. Ever since I’ve joined there’s been one change after another: We’ve moved from the household canvas, where the head of the house registered a household’s details, to individual electoral registration. With that individual responsibility, there’s now online registration. The government has really focused on moving to digital services in the past decade. It was only a couple of years ago that you could apply for a postal vote online for the first time.

But in terms of polling stations, not much has changed in over 100 years—we’ve still got little stubby pencils on strings. But some things are different, like Voter ID, which was a huge change that administrators had to navigate. There have also been smaller changes that wouldn’t necessarily get noticed.

What sort of challenges do electoral administrators face when running elections?

It depends on the poll, but as an example: In 2011, the Fixed-Term Parliament Act came in, which was meant to provide certainty as to when general elections were going to happen. But then we had general elections in 2015, 2017, and 2019, and the act has now been repealed. So that didn’t work at all.

But elections are a huge task. The parliamentary election timetable is 25 working days. To deliver a poll to 48 million people in that timeframe is a huge challenge.

One of the biggest challenges is the rise of postal voting, which has become a huge task in itself. We had over nine and a half million people vote by post as the previous general election. That essentially means getting 28 and a half million envelopes printed, with the ballot papers to go in them, and posting them out in enough time for them to be returned before the close of polls at 10pm on polling day. The government is trying to build some resilience into the system; we’ve got some fantastic election printers but we don’t have enough of them. We’re very reliant on a very small number of very specialist printers.

Another challenge is that since Covid, a lot of the village halls and community centres that we rely on have closed down, and we don’t have as many public buildings. There’s schools, which in legislation returning offices are entitled to use for polls, but unsurprisingly a lot of headteachers aren’t massively keen on this, because they don’t want to close and they often don’t have spare space to use as a polling station.

There’s also staffing. At a general election, there’ll be over 40,000 polling stations which need to be staffed, so you’re looking at somewhere in the region of 200,000 staff working at stations on polling day. And then Covid made a lot of the older generation, who we heavily relied on to work for us, decide they didn’t want to spend 15 hours sat in a polling station with the general public. What’s more, Voter ID made a lot of people more uncomfortable about making those checks in person in a polling station.

And then, as ever, probably the other biggest challenge is money. Elections are hugely expensive to run, and local authority budgets are getting more cash-strapped, trying to balance the books while running elections. The 2019 general election, excluding postage for candidate mailings and so on, cost £103 million, which is an awful lot of money. While parliamentary elections are paid for by the Government in your borough, your city, your district or county, they’re paid for locally, and there’s an awful lot of challenges around that at the minute.

Can you walk us through what the government’s new electoral strategy is aiming to do and how you think it will change elections?

We’re really welcoming the government’s electoral strategy, as we think much of it shows the government’s ambition. You could argue the politics of some of them, but there are a lot of things that are benefits us in terms of the nuts and bolts for electoral administrators.

One of the big tickets is votes for 16-year-olds. The government will have committed that by the next general election. This is actually quite a large challenge for electoral registration offices and administrators; getting 14 and 15-year-olds on the register ready to vote. Currently, you need a national insurance number to register, and they wouldn’t have one. But this is something that’s already been navigated in Wales and Scotland, so it’s not totally new, but it’s on a larger scale in a different context. So we’re thinking about how we can work with the government to make sure we’re allowing young people to be able to cast their vote.

One of the most interesting aspects of the strategy concerned voter ID. Currently, this ID has to be photographic, so driver’s licenses, passports, and similar. The government has said they’ll be looking to introduce bank cards as voter ID, which will help 16-year-olds who won’t have a driver’s license and are less likely to have a passport but quite likely to have a bank card. But just navigating that change will take a bit of work.

The government has said they want automated, not automatic registration. This difference we need to work our way through, but we certainly recognise the value of joining up government data and government services. We find many people are amazed they’re not registered to vote because they’re paying council tax, or they’ve told the DVLA or HMRC that they’ve moved house. So trying to join up all that data is vital to have a moe complete and accurate register.

We were very pleased that there were some timetable changes in there. For postal voting, at the moment, you have until 5pm, 11 working days before the poll, to register for a postal vote. The government is looking to move that to 14 working days before. We understand concerns that this may not give electors as much time, but the challenge we have found is people applying on the deadline are struggling to get their postal vote delivered and returned. I think we have a bit of an Amazon culture in this country, where someone applies for something and expects it that afternoon. Anecdotally, we’ve had electoral administrators say they’ve had complaints from people because the postal vote they applied for that morning hadn’t arrived.

But as I said, we need to print envelopes, ballot paper, the statement and all of those things, which if you’re not applying until 5pm, 11 working days before, you’re now required to have an identity check for. So that’s additional time as well, checking national insurance numbers and date of birth to prevent fraudulent applications. It means a lot of people are being accidentally disenfranchised, as the postal service isn’t getting their postal vote there and back by the time we’ve managed to get it printed. So we’re pleased about that, we think it will better align with the expectations of electors.

There are other small things that are quite interesting on communicating with electors. The poll card for an election tells you where your polling station is, what ID you can bring, and the deadline for absent voting. But actually, that should almost be the last piece of communication that they’re getting. It makes sense for them to have that information up front. If we have their email address, we can tell them as soon as the election is called, to let them know their options. We should send them their application forms for postal voting if we think it’s the best thing to do, or let’s tell them where their polling station is going to be.

The government is also looking to pilot other ways of voting. They’ll be holding pilots, which we have historically also done, on how electors actually engage with democracy. We still have polling stations in village halls in little villages, but the problem is that not everyone can get to those during polling hours on a Thursday.

My brother lives in New Zealand, and last time I was there, we were in a shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon, and there was a polling station. When I was in the departure lounge to fly home, there was a polling station. So I think we should explore alternative ways for people to cast their vote. I have to vote in the polling station for my polling district, but if my child’s school were further up the road and that has a polling station there, then what are the benefits of me being able to do that there rather than forcing people to vote in certain stations?

So there are lots of things in the strategy that we think will be beneficial, but we are worried about a few aspects. They’re looking at introducing identification for people submitting their nomination paper. At a parliamentary election, that’s not a huge number of people, but one of our administrators in the South West took over 2,000 nomination papers for the May polls as they have so many parish councils. So we need to ensure the government’s solutions work for all types of poll, not just Westminster elections.

Finally, it wouldn’t be the AEA without us mentioning we’re disappointed they’re not extending the timetable to give us a bit longer and that they’re not consolidating electoral law, but we can’t ask for everything. We’ll keep it on our wish list.

Can you tell us about potential measures for tackling the abuse of electoral administrators?

We were really disappointed when the Election Act came in because election administrators weren’t included in the new intimidation and harassment provisions. We pushed hard for this, as we see an awful amount of abuse from people who apply for their postal vote too late and get told that, unfortunately, there’s nothing they can do. A lot of these people are low-paid local government officers; they’re not standing for election.

I was speaking to a colleague in Westminster recently who said you can’t justify it, but you can sort of understand why MPs get some abuse because they’re standing on a political ticket for a certain agenda. Election administrators are just trying to help everybody. They’re just doing their best within the confines of legislation. So we’re really pleased that it’s being extended as far as polling station staff. We’ve seen abuse since voter ID was introduced, especially from people who don’t want to provide ID being abusive towards polling station staff. So we’re pleased that it will extend right down to presiding officers and poll clerks caught in the crossfire of voter ID. These are people paid to do a job one day a year, it’s not like they introduced the policy, they’re just there to implement it on behalf of the government.

We’re going through a long process of local government reorganisation in England at the moment. How is that affecting the way elections are run?

There are a lot of nervous election administrators because they’re not entirely sure what elections they’ve got when and what council they’ll be working for in a few years, or even how the parish structure is going to work. But we call ourselves the AEA family, and we’ve got some fantastic members who have been through local government reorganisation. We’re having meetings regularly with the people who are on the fast-track priority programme for them to ask questions and be supported. Their big issue is knowing what’s going to happen when. We saw elections postponed last year, and we’ve already seen some changes in some areas for next year. We just want clarity on what polls they’ve got.

They’ve got other things to consider, also. A lot of them are trying to start community governance reviews to parish unparished areas in their communities, to ensure that once the new authorities have come in we haven’t got any sort of gap where they feel that they could have done with another level of democracy to try and help pick that up. So there’s a lot of CGRs going on at the moment.

There are also concerns, as we all know with local government, that once the new council is formed it can still be many years before they’re working as one team. I saw just today a council starting to try and ratify all their pay structures. But, we’ve got electoral registers with hundreds of thousands of people on, so they’ll be working hard to move as quickly as they can to run on one electoral management system, to ensue that the councillors who are up for poll get all of the information that they need, along with anyone else interested in standing for election. A lot to do, but the biggest issue is just uncertainty.

It keeps on cropping up in unexpected places. I remember seeing the change to the supplementary vote system for mayoral elections being in the English devolution bill as well.

Electoral legislation is covered over 300 pieces of secondary legislation. We’ve been told with the supplementary vote system that won’t be back for next year, we’re probably looking at 2027 for that change to come in, and that’s just bringing back what we had before. But in terms of devolution and bringing in more mayors and how that’ll work with PCC elections or PFCC elections, there’s an awful lot of things that will need to be worked through in a very short period of time with very limited resources.

You released a blueprint for a modern electoral landscape earlier this year. What else that the government hasn’t yet said they’re considering do you think needs to happen for elections to be truly modernised? You’ve already mentioned the consolidation of electoral law and extended election timetables. What else is on the wishlist?

Overseas electors. We’ve extended the franchise – You used to have been registered in the UK within the last 15 years. It’s now the case that it doesn’t matter when you were last registered, as we are still finding overseas electors are registering once the election is called. But they’re not receiving their postal vote, and they don’t have someone locally they can appoint as a proxy. We believe the government should be exploring overseas constituencies to see if that would help. At present, there are 650 constituencies, so 650 different ballot papers to try to get to the person overseas.

Nominations don’t close until 19 days before the polls, so currently we can’t start printing those, and they are moving the time of that. It’s going to go to midday hopefully, instead of 4pm, so we can get printing a bit sooner. But we think if overseas constituencies were introduced, then we could start considering alternative ways of overseas electors voting, as there could be several ways depending on what’s necessary based on the numbers. They could potentially be admitted by the Electoral Commission centrally, or they could appoint returning officers to manage those constituencies. But at present, all 650 constituencies have overseas electors who we’re trying to navigate those challenges for, which is a bit of a struggle.

We’ve also discussed in our blueprint when and how we vote. Currently, polling day is on a Thursday for 15 hours, and postal voting is available if you can’t get there during that time. However the vast majority of Europe votes at weekends. What would the benefits be of us moving to weekend voting? We could get schools for instance as children aren’t in lessons, helping us with our venue issues, and potentially with our staffing problems as we’d now have parents who could help out. You just find an awful lot of staff who can’t do 15 hours in the week due to other commitments. If you look at Australia, PTAs run BBQs and things like that to try and make polling day more of an event. So combining that with moving to voting hubs and pulling in a larger crowd of people all of those things could benefit.

In their strategy, the government has discussed the use of technology, so we’ve said what benefits could having tablets in polling stations bring? Being able to scan someone’s poll card to ensure they get the right ballot papers would help to de-risk some of the process, but also helps with the point I made about voting anywhere. If you could vote anywhere within your council area, potentially then you could vote anywhere within the UK, because you could just print out the ballot paper that the elector needs. This would mean you wouldn’t need a postal vote. Some of these are larger plans I suspect we’re not necessarily quite ready for, but we’re really hopeful that the pilots will explore some of these options.