Police commissioner elections - where?

Today you can vote for a local police commissioner.

If you want to find your local candidates, see the West Midlands site here.

If you're anything like me, then you may have lost your polling card. So you might wonder where the polling station is (I remembered that mine had changed location, but not where the new location is), and off I popped to Birmingham City Council (BCC) website to find it.

The Elections Office site doesn't have it. Hmm. A search on the BCC site for "polling stations location" doesn't return it. Back to trusty Google, and an old post from the Birmingham Newsroom (still not clear how that's different to BCC 'news') implies the info is available via BBC's "My Local Information" section. Back to BCC homepage. Where is "My Local Information"?

*argh*. No link to "My Local Information" from the homepage. Back to Google.

Ah, here's "My Local Information". Click to go to the *actual* My Local Information page. Enter postcode. I have to tell the system my exact house number? Not sure I really want to do that, so I choose a neighbour's house.

And then it shows me the information. To be fair, there's quite a lot of helpful info on that page. Sadly, the polling station location is wrong, still listing the old polling station (Selly Park Tavern Skittle Alley).

Finally, after re-searching the BCC site for "polling station" (! such a different search than the one above that didn't return relevant results) I get some relevant results. IN PDF FORMAT! Bleugh.

But if you need to find your local polling station with a tiny bit less pain, here's the list.

And if you used to vote in the Selly Park Tavern, you need to go off to the BAYC Conference Centre, Hilda Simister House, 581Pershore Road, Selly Park, Birmingham, B29 7EL.

Here's hoping some lovely open data for the whole country featuring polling stations arrives on .gov.uk soon :).