Summary
Democracy Club is the UK civic-tech non-profit that maintains the canonical open datasets for UK elections — candidate records, polling-station locations, ballot papers, results — and the consumer-facing websites that turn those datasets into voter information tools (WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk, election leaflets, polling-station finder).
Body
Democracy Club’s data model treats election information as a public-data commons: anyone should be able to look up their candidates, polling station, and ballot issues from a single normalised dataset rather than scraping fifty council websites. The candidates database (candidates.democracyclub.org.uk) is the canonical UK source of parliamentary, council, mayoral, and combined-authority candidate records. [source: democracy-club]
The group’s open data is licensed for free reuse and is API-accessible; downstream sites (WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk, the PollingStation app, and the Democracy Club iOS app) consume the structured feed and present it to voters. Local-authority data feeds are produced by volunteers and verified by Elections team members during election windows. [source: democracy-club]
Democracy Club also publishes the UK General Election candidate JSON, the by-election feed, and an election-leaflet collection — turning ephemeral campaign artefacts into durable public data. Its work is widely cited in civic-tech literature as a model of volunteer-built civic infrastructure. [source: democracy-club]
The non-profit’s model — volunteer data-collection, open data licensing, public-funding and grant-funded core operations — is the model civic-tech projects in other countries tend to copy. Democracy Club regularly publishes its’ “how we built this” documentation. [source: democracy-club]
Use it for
Referencing UK candidate data, polling locations, or ballot issues in a research project; designing a civic-tech project that consumes an open-data API; citing a working model of volunteer-maintained, open-data civic infrastructure; suggesting the Democracy Club pattern to a non-UK civic-tech team.