Digital Privacy

Election Watch 2007 – Devote your day to democracy!

map showing where ORG volunteers have agreed to observe electionsDoing anything exciting on election day? ORG is looking for volunteers to “devote their day to democracy” and become ORG’s Electoral Commission accredited election observers for the e-voting pilots on Thursday 3 May.

We’ll provide you with full instructions on the kind of things that will be expected of you on the day. We’ll also supply a factsheet of what to look out for in each of the different pilots. We’ll expect you to be travelling around the pilot area during the day, and to turnaround a quick report for us afterwards.

If you live in or around the eleven pilot areas (or are willing to travel there) and you’d like to help out, please let us know. Sign up to our pledge on Pledgebank – we’re using a beta feature that lets you input which of the pilot areas you’re volunteering for. The image on the right shows where volunteers have already signed up.

Please take a look down the list of pilot areas to see if there’s one near you, or one you’d be willing to travel to. The information in brackets will help you sign up to the right area using the Pledgebank system.

The five e-voting pilot areas are:

  • Rushmoor (use “Aldershot” in Pledgebank)
  • Sheffield
  • Shrewsbury & Atcham (use “Shrewsbury” in Pledgebank)
  • South Bucks (use “Denham” – the one near Uxbridge, Harefield, Fulmer)
  • Swindon (the one near Wroughton, Draycot Foliat, Chisledon)

The six e-counting pilot areas are:

  • Bedford
  • Breckland (use “East Dereham”)
  • Dover
  • South Bucks (use “Denham” – the one near Uxbridge, Harefield, Fulmer)
  • Stratford-upon-Avon
  • Warwick (the one near Leek Wootton, Old Milverton, Leamington)

To read more about e-voting in the UK and across the world, download our briefing pack. If you do volunteer, you’ll be playing a vital role. We need bodies on the ground to inform us about irregularities, machine (and human!) error and even fraudulent activities relating to the trialling of electronic voting mechanisms.