It is your responsibility to retain election documents after the poll.
You should maintain a document retention policy. You should ensure that you do not retain documents for longer than the period specified in your document retention policy and that they are securely destroyed at the appropriate point. Your document retention policy should set out the following for all documents you receive and hold:
whether the document contains personal data
the lawful basis on which any persona data was collected (see lawful basis for processing in our data protection guidance)
your retention period
your rationale for the retention period
In some cases this will be straightforward since electoral legislation will require a set period for which documents are retained. You can find a list of these documents in responsibility for sealing and retaining election documents. In other cases, you will need to make a local decision and justify this in your document retention policy.
For more information see our data protection guidance for Electoral Registration Officers and Returning Officers.
Election notices published on your website
You will need to consider whether it is appropriate or necessary for the various election notices published on your website to remain there beyond the expiry of the petition period for the election.
Where each notice serves a specific purpose, i.e. advising who will be a candidate at the election, once the election is over, and the opportunity to question that election has passed, they serve no further purpose. Therefore, you should either remove such notices published on your website, or remove the personal data contained in these notices, once the petition deadline for that election has passed.
Data protection legislation does permit personal data to be stored for longer periods if the data will be processed solely for archiving purposes in the public interest, or for scientific, historical, or statistical purposes and subject to the implementation of appropriate safeguards. For election results, for example, you should retain these on your website as they are for public interest and historical and statistical purposes.
Return of equipment
You should make arrangements to return any equipment, such as the empty ballot boxes, to storage.
During this process you should conduct an audit of your equipment, identifying any damaged items for repair or disposal. This will enable you to plan for any replacements you may need to purchase for future polls.