Delivering Trustworthy Electoral Oversight – UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub

Developing an Automated Analysis of Electoral Spending Disclosures in the UK

Delivering Trustworthy Electoral Oversight aims to understand how electoral regulators and management bodies can benefit from using automated systems to better analyse and administer elections. It is widely accepted that democratic elections should be both free and fair, but also that citizens believe that elections exhibit these traits. It is also essential that the institutions in charge of managing elections are trusted in the delivery of these goals.

Currently, however, regulators struggle to keep up with technological developments, and the vast majority are under-resourced and time-poor. At a time when the integrity of elections – in even the most well-established democracies – is under attack, a focus on getting these things right is more important than ever. We will, therefore, explore and test how to render any automated system trustworthy in the eyes of the public

The project will generate insight for – and design – a natural language processing model that can classify and analyse election spending returns in near real time. This will allow us to better identify wrongdoing, concerning practice, and non-compliance. In the absence of good quality information, concerns about electoral integrity foment. Our project will also, therefore, provide data to the public, and analyse it for public consumption. Automated analysis can therefore provide a tool to electoral regulators, but also rich data for academics, journalists and activists to use in their own work.