frontend: Elections API
The Contact Electoral Registration Office page is published as a Local Transaction format page. These usually do postcode lookups via Locations API and then get council and URL information from Local Links Manager.
Electoral Commission have a public API for finding this information which they keep up to date.
The API is also capable of disambiguating postcodes that span local authority boundaries.
The API contains other information, such as dates and times of elections and where your local polling station is, however we're not using that yet.
Reverting to the local transaction
Should we need to revert to not using the API, we just need to comment out or
remove the line in routes.rb that sends requests to electoral_controller.
The content item is still a local transaction, so the standard routing will kick in further down.
Contact
Electoral Commission's public contact details are:
- phone: 0333 103 1928
- web: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/contact-us
The API is currently supported by Democracy Club, so another good place to ask for help is the Democracy Club Slack
Development
To interact with the API locally, create a .env file in the root of this project with the following entries:
ELECTIONS_API_URL=<get value from integration secrets>
ELECTIONS_API_KEY=<get value from integration secrets>
The API has its own documentation.
Application flows
Unambiguous postcode
Land on https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office
Enter unambiguous postcode (eg W1A 1AA)
Click "Find"
See results on https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office?postcode=w1a+1aa
Ambiguous postcode
Land on https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office
Enter ambiguous postcode (eg WV14 8TU)
Click "Find"
See address picker on https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office??postcode=WV14+8TU
Select an address and click "Continue"
See results on https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office?uprn=10008768298
Postcode with no location
Land on https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office
Enter "valid" postcode that doesn't exist in a local authority (eg XM45 HQ)
Click "Find"
See "We couldn't find this postcode" error on https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office?postcode=xm45hq
Invalid postcode
Land on https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office
Enter invalid postcode (eg Bernard)
Click "Find"
See "This isn't a valid postcode" error on https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office?postcode=Bernard
Invalid UPRN
Navigate to an invalid UPRN somehow: https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office?uprn=HELLO
See "This isn't a valid address" error on https://www.gov.uk/contact-electoral-registration-office?uprn=HELLO