It was good of Danivon to make his comment comparing the BNP’s vote to last year because such information is hard to come by. Not being a political anorak I don’t have copies of old election results knocking around: I figure that if I really want them I can get them from the council’s website.
Wrong.
You think I would have learned my lesson by now (being that the council website is not very good). I always get told off for criticising the council website, but it is not the easiest site in the world to find your way around. At the moment it contains borough election results from 2004, county and general election results from 2005, and borough results from 2007, but has skipped 2006.
I know why, and it is nothing sinister – just poor design of the information structure. They have a page for election results which has the lastest borough elections, with links to the last few down the side. When this year’s results came in they just replaced the 2006 results with the 2007 ones but did not move the 2006 ones into the sidebar with the rest.
This is not just an isolated instance of missing or out-of-date information on the site. Go to the wonderfully easy to remember page http://www.crawley.gov.uk/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=398 and see that local elections “will be held” on may 3rd 2007. A whole week after the elections and it still says there are only 18 Tory councillors. And it still helpfully points out that we have until April 25th to register for a postal vote.
On the same page there is a link to the members expenses for 2004/5. Why only that one year? Why is no more recent information available? And don’t even bother trying to look up the register of members’ interests online like you can with the West Sussex website!
On the statistics page it will tell you that there were an average of 2,023 visits per day last September but nothing more recent than that. This is the 21st Century and we have come to rely on the Internet as a source of up-to-the-minute information so a site which takes more than a week to reflect the management of its own organisation is not acceptable.
If the borough’s website only cost fifty quid a year to run and had one person doing in in his spare time like this one it would be forgivable, but it costs hell of a lot more than that.
Worthin Lib Dems Have helpfully compiled the results from Sussex districts. Otherwise I’d be in the same state as you, banging my head against the useless crawley.gov.uk brick wall. Everywhere else just has the basic results in seats.
Anyway, you could have linked to the anoraky analysis that I provide on the local elections here. It took me ages to do it…
Danivon’s fantastic analysis what took ages to do… 🙂
Had I seen it first I would have done. I only saw it after writing that. Good work and some interesting interpretations.
Looking at the time you posted it I realised why you were a bit late to the constituency meeting yesterday.