Project date: 1 May 2024
Link to tool: https://www.electoralcommissionhelp.co.uk/
Whether you’re a campaigner ensuring compliance with electoral law or a journalist investigating the practice of a campaign, finding the answers you need can be a time consuming and at times non-straightforward process. Navigating the EC website is not always intuitive, and sometimes the documentation containing the answers you need can be difficult to find. Not only does this make successfully finding the answers to your questions a tedious and slow endeavour, it often precludes you from doing so – exposing those citizens engaged in electoral participation to legal risk whilst at the same time making it more difficult to hold deliberate rule-breakers to account.
Enter the Electoral Commission bot – a tool that provides the answer to any question you might have on UK electoral law, instantly.
The bot, built by Campaign Labbers Jethro, Lucy and Lefke is trained on the Electoral Commission’s website and all of the documentation contained therein. Users can ask questions in English, and enjoy fast access to high quality answers:
Powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), this tool is capable of ‘hallucinating’ i.e. occasionally returning false statements not supported by its training data. To counteract this and ensure usability, the model is trained to provide sources for the statements it provides, allowing the user to implement a ‘trust, but verify’ approach – something we consider best practice for all LLM use.
As is the case for all of our tools, iterative improvement is only made possible by testing and user feedback. If you have any feedback for this tool, please feel free to get in touch with [email protected]
Github Link: https://github.com/Blue-Cardigan/electoral-commission-chatbot
Contact: [email protected]
8 May 2025