Mark Pack has just written a piece about this Act, which includes some provision to faciliate data-sharing in the future.
It is a fairly detailed review, and may be of interest to some. http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2009/07/27/political-parties-elections-act-2009/ Rghds Matt ------------- "The Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 also paves the way for a series of pilots on how the quality of the electoral register could be improved by making more use of the data held by public authorities. There are many records in the public sector of who lives where which currently are not used to help improve the accuracy or completeness of the electoral register. This is linked to individual registration as switching from household registration may result in lower registration rates (as was the case in Northern Ireland). Better use of other data could be a way to help compensate for this. Sharing more government data raises obvious fears about privacy, accuracy and security, but the examples of countries such as Australia show how, done well, it can bring sensible electoral benefits. These pilots could be a really good route to making better use of data in ways that people are happy with. However, the experience of the pilots on e-voting should give pause for caution, as in those little emphasis was given to issues such as cross-checking accuracy of data and transparency of (and so confidence in) in data handling procedures." _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
