Marked registers made easy thanks to Lib Dem software volunteers Fred Fisher has been leading a team of software volunteers working to make easier one of the key post-election admin tasks: dealing with marked electoral registers. Here he explains what it’s all about and how Liberal Democrats can make use of the new tools. The more voters we talk to during a campaign, the more votes we win. Knowing if someone is likely to vote is crucial to using our time effectively. Finding out who votes and who doesn’t used to be time-consuming and complicated, but now we can use the power of computers to find out who the voters are automatically, just by clicking a button. In the last general election, less than 70% of those eligible voted. In the last local elections it was only 35%. So knowing who is and isn’t likely to vote can make a huge difference to how effective our campaigning is. If we knock on the doors of only the people who are likely to vote, we can speak with three times as many voters in the same session – as if we had three times as many volunteers. We can also make sure supporters who don’t usually vote are given extra encouragement to sign up for postal votes. How do we know who the voters are? On polling day, at every polling station there is a printed copy of the electoral register. After you vote, your name is crossed off the list. The resulting document is called a “marked register”. Political parties may purchase a scanned copy of the marked register from local councils after an election. Until recently, the only way to load it into our canvassing database was for a volunteer to go over each page manually, entering data into a spreadsheet. This took hundreds of volunteers thousands of hours for each election; plus a big coordination effort by a heroic data officer. As a result, less than a third of local Lib Dem parties do it at all; and those that do tend to focus just on a few target wards. But now we have built a new computer system that can process your marked registers automatically. If every local party did this, we could triple the number of voters we speak with in local elections. Furthermore, our volunteers could spend more time talking with voters and less time filling out spreadsheets. The system is certified by party HQ as compliant with GDPR. Accuracy varies depending on the local area, but in most areas it’s more accurate than human-entered data. If it doesn’t work well enough in your area at first, the machine can learn and improve – then try again. At the moment, the system is free to use. But due to the computing power required, we will soon begin charging to use it. If you have any marked registers that haven’t been processed yet, we suggest you upload them ASAP while it’s still free. To request access to the system please email libdemsoftware at gmail dot com.