64 Authorities Set for 2026 Vote — Polling Stations Near Me
The 2026 English local elections are scheduled for Thursday 7 May 2026, and the project covers 64 active authorities holding elections that day. For anyone searching polling stations near me, the headline number is not just the date; it is the scale of the forecast work built around those 64 authorities.
The model produces 1,536 output rows, with each authority-scenario combination carrying a point estimate plus calibrated P10, P50, and P90 values. Those values come from 2,000 draws of the empirical error distribution, using six 2026 scenarios against the same historical baseline.
64 Authorities in the Model
The 64 active authorities include 32 London boroughs, 27 metropolitan boroughs, and 5 West Yorkshire authorities. That is the full set the project uses for the 2026 run, so the scope is fixed at the level of authority rather than at a national total.
Across those 64 English authorities and six 2026 scenarios, the strongest scenario shock was only 13% of the median uncertainty band. The article says the most aggressive challenger surge it could parameterise sits inside the noise the model has produced in past elections.
Historical Error Pools
The calibration rests on tier-level mean-centered historical error pools from the 2014 to 2018 training window and the 2018 to 2022 backtest. The 2026 uncertainty bands are sampled from the bootstrap pool formed by those historical error pools, which is why the scenario ranges are tied to prior election error rather than to a fresh assumption set.
The project also says this is the second instalment of a project on English local electoral data, after Part 1 corrected a categorical-normalisation bug that reversed the original headline. Here, the division between scenario shock and uncertainty width is the point: the 13% figure is the first divided by the second, and the model’s calibrated band is still wider than the most aggressive scenario applied to it.
Thursday 7 May 2026
For readers planning ahead, the practical date is Thursday 7 May 2026, when the 64 authorities go to election. The model’s output suggests that anyone reading forecasts for those contests should weigh the uncertainty bands alongside the scenario labels, because the largest stress case remains smaller than the middle of the calibrated range.
