How Full Fact will be covering the 2026 elections

Millions of us will have the opportunity to vote at a national and local level, in the biggest set of elections since the 2024 General Election. A significant opportunity for people to make an informed choice. Uniquely, this year we will be voting whilst the current Representation of the People Bill is being debated in parliament. This includes the potential to more widely reduce the voting age to 16 as well as a variety of suggestions around how we maintain the integrity of our elections in this age of AI and an increased threat of coordinated information campaigns targeting our democracy.

It is against this backdrop that Full Fact is undertaking an ambitious range of activities to ensure that you, our audience are as well informed as possible and that we develop a comprehensive understanding of what elections in 2026 look and feel like. Alongside our fact checking we will use our AI powered monitoring to gather evidence to inform our annual report on the state of the online information environment and to continue our advocacy in ensuring our election laws are world class. Here are the main areas we'll be focusing on:

Fact Checking

We have already started checking claims that might come up and in a first for us, we have assigned members of our team to specifically monitor and check key claims from the Welsh and Scottish elections as well as our wider team monitoring all parts of upcoming elections in England. We won’t be able to cover everything, but we will focus on the most prominent, harmful or newsworthy claims we see.

Crowdsourcing

We have set up a WhatsApp tip line to allow anyone to send us things that you think we should be looking at. Again, we won’t be able to cover everything, but your input will help us widen the lens for claims we look at and ensure we can focus on the most important things.

Candidates

As we did with the 2024 UK elections, we will be monitoring claims made on social media by candidates standing for elections. We will be basing this on accounts listed by our friends at Democracy Club and will be looking across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok. Again, we won’t be able to check everything but we will be on the look out for repeats of claims we have already fact checked - we’ll also be analysing the topics candidates are focusing on.

AI advice

As part of our ongoing work to best understand all parts of the way we consume information, we have been asking popular large language models questions about election integrity every day for the last few weeks and we will continue to do so through out the pre election period

Leaflets

What you get through your door matters. We will once again be working with our friends at Democracy Club (and you all) to try and develop a picture of claims made wherever you are. Send them to the Elections Leaflet Project, send them to us through WhatsApp, tag us on social media. We are interested.

Adverts

We will continue our long standing work with the brilliant Who Targets Me to identify claims made in online political adverts. Big tech companies have reduced the quality of the long standing ad libraries we use to monitor these, but through our work with WTM we will continue to hold parties (and platforms) to account for claims made online.

We intend to blog about this as we go and pull out the key insights during and after the election.

As ever we can only do this with your support. We are a small charity and elections are uniquely testing for our small team. If you are able to support us with a donation, no matter how small we would be grateful.