Peterborough Currents launches city council vote tracker

Which city councillors voted to hire more bus drivers in 2025? Who supported the plan to eliminate staff positions at the Peterborough Public Library? And who voted to restore grant funding to arts and social service non-profits?

City councillor voting records are a key datapoint for citizens who want to ascertain whether their elected officials are representing them well.

But if you’ve ever tried to track how your ward councillors vote, you’ll know it isn’t easy. It can be hard to sort through online news articles on votes that took place months ago, and sifting through council meeting minutes on the city’s website is a chore. Councillors’ voting records slowly fade away from the public record, making it hard for citizens to hold them to account.

It shouldn’t be so difficult, and our democracy would be better off if it were easier. That’s why Peterborough Currents has built a user-friendly database of city council vote records for you to browse.

Today, Currents is launching our city council vote tracker, a citizen engagement tool to help you hold your elected officials accountable. The database is accessible at this URL: votetracker.peterboroughcurrents.ca.

For now, this tracker is a pilot project and the database only includes votes related to the 2025 city budget. We needed to start small to iron out the kinks of the database and user interface. If you see any bugs, or if there are any features that would make this tool more useful to you, please let us know.

Over the course of 2025, we hope to expand the tracker to include other city council votes. Before that happens, we need your feedback.

Did you learn something from this vote tracker? Did it help you decide whether your ward councillor is voting the way you want them to? Let us know! We’d love to hear about it. We are grateful for the growing community of Peterborough residents who are engaging with civic life alongside us.