Commonwealth Parliamentary Association report on 2026 election

“Jersey’s legal framework provides a strong basis for democratic elections. However, substantial legislative changes were adopted less than three months before polling day, creating challenges for implementation and stakeholder preparedness.”

This was the main conclusion of the report of the Commonwealth Observer Mission published on 14 September 2026.

The report made nine recommendations.  In summary –

1. The Jersey Electoral Authority’s role, budget, and mandate could be reviewed and aligned to ensure they are fit for purpose.
2. There should be a review of early, postal, and home voting, using data on turnout, accessibility, cost, timeliness, and ballot security. Any changes can then be legislated and operationalised well before the next election.
3. Consideration could be given to establishing an independent boundaries commission to conduct regular reviews of Deputy constituency boundaries and assess the impact of proposed structural reforms to the Assembly on voter equity.
4. Consideration could be given to a comprehensive, independent audit and rigorous testing of the Automatic Voter Registration system to ensure its accuracy, completeness, and resilience before it is relied upon in future elections.
5. Consideration could be given to strengthening political finance transparency and oversight mechanisms which establish a coherent, enforceable, and proportionate transparency regime for candidates, registered parties, third parties, and entities that campaign to influence electoral outcomes.
6. Consideration could be given to commissioning an information integrity resilience assessment to identify vulnerabilities across legal, operational, cyber, data protection, media, malign influence, and political finance domains.
7. The States Greffe could explore publishing an anonymised turnout report, appropriately aggregated by age group and gender, using the available data.
8. Consideration could be given to establishing a clear, accessible and time-bound administrative electoral-complaints procedure available to voters, candidates, parties, civil society organisations and other persons with a legitimate interest.
9. The States Greffe could consider publishing complete, timely and machine-readable election results for every contest, constituency and polling location, including all candidates and separate figures for valid, blank and invalid ballots.

A summary of the report has been included the Centre’s Policy Brief 2026 election.  The Brief provides a comprehensive analysis of the 2026 election including –

• The legal framework.
• Analysis of the turnout, including a comparison with the 2025 Guernsey election. Jersey’s published turnout figure was 32.4% compared with Guernsey’s 72.1%. However, the difference is largely explained by different practices for registering electors.
• A detailed analysis of the results for the senator, deputy and constable elections.
• The impact of holding the election on a Sunday
• The impact of automatic voter registration, which may have increased the number of voters slightly, but which reduced the published turnout by as much as ten percentage points.
• The impact on equality of voting power of reducing the number of deputies to make way for nine senators.

The Brief is one of 30 covering all aspects of public policy in Jersey and which are kept continually up to date.