Elections Bodies Editing and Proofreading Services

An electoral commission's product is confidence. The count is almost always right; whether people believe it is right depends on documents written months earlier and on communications issued in the hours when results are unclear. Every ambiguity is an opening — for an honest voter who spoils a ballot because the instruction was unclear, and for a bad-faith actor who will quote your own imprecise sentence back at you as evidence of something. Electoral writing has to be simultaneously simple enough for every adult and exact enough to survive adversarial reading.

We edit what electoral management bodies produce — voter information and how-to-vote material, ballot paper design and instructions to voters, registration and enrolment communications, postal and advance voting instructions, accessibility information and alternative format material, poll worker manuals and training content, procedure manuals for returning officers, counting, recount and adjudication guidance, candidate and party nomination guides, campaign finance and disclosure guidance, election night reporting and results communications, statements addressing misinformation, post-election reports and recommendations to the legislature, and observer and media accreditation material. Our editors work on source text that will be translated into many languages and produced in accessible formats.

Voting instructions are the most-read and least-forgiven text an election body produces, and the standard version is written by people who know how voting works. It tells the voter to mark the ballot "in accordance with the instructions", warns against making any other mark, and does not answer the questions people actually have at the booth: what if I make a mistake, what if I only want to vote in one of the two contests, does anyone see how I voted. We rewrite these so the instruction shows what a correctly marked ballot looks like rather than describing it, so the recovery path is stated first — you can ask for a replacement ballot, as many as twice — because fear of spoiling is what produces spoiled ballots, and so partial voting is explicitly permitted where it is permitted. We also make the rejection criteria available in the same plain language used for the instruction, since a rule that determines whether a vote counts should not be published only in the version poll workers read.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including material before an election period and draft procedures. We are editors rather than electoral or legal advisers and offer no view on electoral law, procedure or administration. What we can do is make instructions unambiguous, accessible and resilient to hostile misreading.