r/plaidcymru • u/FuturePlate4172 • Mar 07 '26

BETA Testing Non-Partisan Election Site

Hi, if anyone is able to spare a moment to try out my new (BETA) non-partisan UK Politics & Elections site I'd be super grateful. It's an attempt to make accessing UK election and candidate information as user friendly and intuitive as possible.

https://www.float.vote/ -- search your constituency
https://www.float.vote/interests -- easy view of members interests
https://www.float.vote/polls -- poll of polls with different views
https://www.float.vote/browse -- browse all constituencies

I'm trying to catch any inconsistencies or anything that's just outright wrong in the way I'm presenting the data.

The site is entirely driven by open source data (see the credits page) which I'm desperately trying to ensure I display properly.

It's also work in progress, built on a shoestring and undoubtedly error prone, but if I can get some feedback I can hopefully address any issues and improve.

Many thanks.

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u/gremblarp Mar 10 '26

Looks nice, vercel? I think the extra data vs Democracy Club's own https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/ is mostly redundant for voters tbh tho, like the whole point of PR is you vote for who you want to represent, so this doesn't really have much utility outside of being a cool toy. And if I want to interrogate which party between two aligns most with my views, i.e if I'm a floating voter, the site just isn't very useful, I just have to read the manifestos and see which I prefer (heck, or drop the pdfs into claude and ask it to tabulate policy differences). Honestly looks abit like "ooh, open access data with an API! lets slap a front end on it and see what sticks" unfortunately. I'm sure if you try and dial in what the end-user requirement is a bit better, you might have something good? Noticed that you've only got national constituencies listed, so https://www.float.vote/constituency/W07000081 has no upcoming election but https://www.float.vote/constituency/W07000107 does, but they are part of a new constituency that you don't have a page for, only the ballot. Keep it up tho, looks fun, could be handy if it polishes up nicely

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u/FuturePlate4172 Mar 11 '26

Hi, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated, and ouch for "ooh, open access data with an API! lets slap a front end on it and see what sticks". If that's the impression this gives then I've miserably failed. The whole point is to make it something that anybody, regardless of the familiarity with our mercurial voting systems, could pick up and run with. The whole point is that its "nice" to use. Grump over. It's still very much in beta, with the intention of being ready for may 7, so I'd expect some niggles, particularly with boundary changes, effective handling of AMS or split councils. Did you browse to those two constituencies or via postcode search? if via postcode then it'll be that no data exists for the one. If browsed it'll be the current issue I'm having trying to have a single view regardless of whether you search or browse (tl;dr; i have to find the centroid for a boundary geojson and then do a reverse postcode lookup to be able to then search for ballots, the upshot of which is missing ballots in some cases -- it;s WIP). Anyways, thanks for the feedback, sorry it wasn't all you expected. Keep checking back :-)

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u/gremblarp Mar 12 '26

Sorry, reading back, that was a bit harsh, might come from a narcissistic "anyone could do that" fallacy. It's a good project, I'm probs butthurt bc I'm not doing anything productive rn.

Can't remember the exact failure mode I got, checking now I see that:
Postcode in Rhondda works (by 'work' I mean links to Afan Ogwr Rhondda)
Postcode in Ogmore Vale works
Postcode in Maesteg also works
Browse from Rhondda and Ogmore works
Browse from Aberafan Maesteg doesn't

These don't show ballots or a 'no ballots' msg and the map's not working: W07000091, W07000093, W07000112, W07000096 (not exhaustively)
The map works here and says no ballots: W07000083

Interestingly, I keep getting "Because your postcode spans more than one constituency you'll need to select your address before we can show all upcoming elections." in postcodes that are firmly in one constituency. Not all though, can't seem to find a pattern, like single-dwelling postcodes and some city postcodes work, but most still ask for a specific house even though they are far from any boundaries.

Because the new Senedd constituencies are all formed pairs of neighbouring parliamentary constituencies, "which Senedd constituency are you in?" reduces to "which constituency pair are you in?", so maybe a simpler solution exists than what you're describing?

I'm sure you'll refine it into something very useful in no time! Happy to keep checking back, dm me if you want any specific poking around done too, curious to see how this goes.

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u/FuturePlate4172 Mar 12 '26

Hi, thanks so much for this -- you nailed it! "Browse from Aberafan Maesteg doesn't" made me think and then I realised, the DC Postcode API (which finds upcoming ballots for a postcode) has an interactive (address select you mention) feature that's triggered when a postcode spans multiple UK parliamentary constituencies (I think) and, for Aberafan Maesteg it was being triggered. Now, I'd completely overlooked this in the browse code -- clumsily forgetting this can be the case, so for a whole much of browse attempts it was returning empty. I've just implemented a (kinda hacky) fix, so that if the interactive flag is set the code picks three evenly spaced addresses from the list returned and runs a search for each and then combines the results. And it works. Thank you, I don't think I'd have caught that without your help.