Mapping the Brexit vote – researchers appeal for hidden ‘boxcounts’

Ten years on from the UK’s referendum on EU membership, an ambitious effort is underway to create the most detailed map of Brexit voting patterns to date.

Researchers at Aberystwyth University are appealing to campaigners, party activists and referendum observers to dig out informal tallies — known as ‘boxcounts’ — recorded when ballot boxes were opened on referendum night.

Official referendum results were reported at local authority level, offering only a broad overview of the geography of Leave and Remain support.

What these figures conceal, however, are the more fine‑grained patterns within communities: whether suburbs voted differently from city centres, how small towns compared with surrounding rural areas, or what divisions existed within local neighbourhoods.

To uncover these deeper geographies, the research team, led by Professor Michael Woods at the Centre for Welsh Politics and Society, is seeking the unofficial boxcounts taken during the verification stage of the count.

These informal tallies, recorded before the formal count began, could offer rare insights into how specific neighbourhoods and localities voted.

Professor Woods said:

“The EU referendum was the defining event in recent British politics and has shaped our political landscape for the last decade. We often talk about ‘Leave areas’ and ‘Remain areas’, but we don’t really know how communities voted beneath the level of local authorities. By bringing together boxcounts from across the UK, we can build a much more detailed picture of where support for Brexit was strongest, where it was weakest, and how these patterns relate to different types of places.

“As boxcounts from the referendum are unofficial no one has collected them together, but they will still be saved on people’s computers or archived in old campaign folders. We’re urging anyone who recorded or collated them to dig them out and send them to us.”

The team has developed a rigorous process to check and correct for any potential bias, and safeguards to ensure that privacy requirements are complied with.

Referendum campaigners who have boxcounts to contribute can find full details on how to submit them on the Rural Spatial Justice Substack: https://ruralspatialjustice.substack.com/p/do-you-have-boxcounts-from-the-2016

The study forms part of the wider research project Rural Discontent, Spatial Justice and Disruptive Politics, funded by the UK Frontier Research Guarantee, which is exploring connections between rural discontent and populist and disruptive politics globally.