At Democracy Volunteers, we pride ourselves on being a dynamic and flexible organisation, ready to adapt to anything that is thrown at us!
During the COVID-19 global pandemic, we have not stopped tirelessly working to stay on top of the major issues surrounding elections which is why a team of our experts spent three months interviewing international election experts, international and UK practitioners and attending webinars around the world so we could make our mark on the debate of how to run elections in a pandemic-conscious way.
We published our report ‘Protecting Democracy: How to run an election during the pandemic in the UK on 24 July 2020 and contains 10 key recommendations:
- Extra time for election preparation
- Changes to the candidate nomination process for parties
- Introduction of ‘Advance Voting’
- Caution over largescale extension of postal voting
- Encouraging in-person voting where possible, with a clear voter ‘Code of Conduct’ in place at polling stations
- Extension of ‘Emergency Proxy’ system for those asked to self-isolate
- Use of ‘Mobile Ballot Boxes’ for those asked to self-isolate
- Use of ‘Chair’s Proxy’ for those asked to self-isolate on polling day
- ‘Golden Hours’ for older voters and those most vulnerable to the virus
- ‘Election Ambassadors’ at polling stations
You can read the full report below.
If you require a physical copy of the report, these are available for £5.00 GBP. You can secure your copy today by contacting us.
If you couldn’t make it, you can still watch the recording of our launch event. See Dr. Leah Phillips, Dr. John Ault and Harry Busz talk about their findings and answer questions.
You can download the slides used by the team for the launch event by clicking the button below