EA Bulletin: 419 England

On Monday (4 August) we launched a statutory consultation on our guidance for Returning Officers on assistance with voting for disabled voters.

The guidance was originally published in advance of the May 2023 elections, to reflect the provisions of the Elections Act 2022, which requires ROs to provide such equipment as is reasonable to enable or make it easier for disabled people to vote independently and in secret, and for the Commission to provide guidance to support ROs in delivering these changes, which ROs must have regard to.  

Ahead of the May 2026 elections, the Scottish and Welsh governments are introducing legislation to align the accessibility provisions for elections in Scotland and Wales with the changes introduced by the Elections Act 2022.  

These changes have provided a timely opportunity to review our existing guidance, drawing on the evidence gathered as part of our monitoring and evaluation from the elections which have taken place across the UK since the changes were first introduced, to help ensure everyone can vote independently and confidently. There should be no barriers to voting for disabled people, and everyone should have the right to vote on their own and in secret.  

Whilst considering the updates to guidance, we have engaged with a range of civil society, charity and third-sector organisations across the whole of the UK, representing people with physical and learning disabilities, mental health conditions, and invisible disabilities. We asked them about the barriers disabled voters experience and possible solutions to make voting more accessible.  

We also discussed the proposed changes with representatives of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers (Solace), Association of Electoral Administrators (AEA), the Election Management Boards (EMB) in Scotland and Wales and government officials.  

How to respond  

The consultation will run until 26 October 2025. You can respond by filling in the form on our website, emailing your views to [email protected]  or writing to us at: Legislation, Strategy and Coordination Team, The Electoral Commission, 3 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8YZ.  

Once we have considered the responses to this statutory consultation, we expect to publish the updated guidance towards the end of 2025 so that ROs can take account of any changes whilst planning for the May 2026 polls.  We will also publish a full response to the consultation; with details of the feedback, we received and how it has been addressed.  

Examples of accessibility support  

To complement the accessibility guidance, we are keen to publish some real-life examples of work undertaken by ROs to support disabled voters, as an additional resource for elections teams. If any administrators are happy to share their experiences, please get in touch via your local regional team.  

If you have any questions, please contact the England regional team on [email protected]   

We are pleased to inform you that we have made updates to the postal voter application forms in response to feedback from the sector. The updated forms now include a dedicated section for middle names. This change is designed to improve the accuracy and consistency of data capture during scanning, helping to reduce errors and streamline processing.

The updated forms were published on our website this morning and you may begin using the updated versions from that date.

We appreciate the input that led to this improvement and remain committed to ensuring our materials are accessible, effective, and operationally sound.  However, please note that we would not normally be able to revise forms based on ad hoc requests that are not directly as a result of changes to the function of a form or because of a change to legislation. 

For the last few months we have been asking many of you for copies of the marked electoral registers from the 2024 UK general election. This is a piece of work in collaboration with the British Election Study, run by the Universities of Manchester and Oxford.    

The study includes surveys of representative samples of people around the election and asks them, among lots of other things, whether they voted or not. The data provided by the marked registers is then compared against individuals’ answers in the survey to check whether people who said that they voted actually did, and vice versa.    

With your help, we’ve been able to collect registers covering over 86% of all the wards surveyed by the British Election Study.    

Ultimately this project gives us the best assessment of the levels of turnout for different types of people (by age, ethnicity etc). The findings for the 2024 election will take time to emerge but the results from previous polls give a good indication of what we can learn from this type of research.    

Thank you to everyone for their help with this project.