Month: May 2011

Categories
notes from JK

My priorities for finance & central services

I’ve been in post as Cabinet member for Finance & Central Services on Brighton & Hove City Council just over a week. In that time I’ve had to absorb a huge amount of information from the range of areas my portfolio covers and meet some of the officers responsible.

Last Thursday I met most of my heads of departments to introduce myself and set out my key priorities for the portfolio.

I have three top priorities for Finance & Central Services:

  1. Openness & Participation
    I want to push the council to be as open as possible in everything it does, and significantly improve citizen participation in our decision-making.
  2. Excellent Customer Service
    Expectations for customer service are, rightly, higher than ever. I believe the council can rise to the challenge and give our service users excellent customer service. In doing so we won’t just deliver great service, will improve people’s faith in the council.
  3. The Budget
    We need to meet the challenge of the central government funding cuts being imposed on us, whilst staying true to the Green Party’s ambitions and principles. No easy task.

In terms of things I’ll be doing to deliver those principles, the local manifesto is my starting point. This actually surprises some people, but yes party members democratically approved the manifesto and we plan to work to it!

There are already loads of great ideas bouncing around the council offices, and I’ve got plenty of things I’d like to see put in place. We’re going to get stuck in, and I look forward to keeping you updated here on my blog.

Categories
voting

OSCE flag concerns with Estonian e-voting system

Emilis Dambauskas writes:

I have noticed that OSCE published final assessment report for Estonian Parliamentary Elections that happened on 6th March 2011:

http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/estonia/75382

Executive summary states:

Voters could cast their ballots via the Internet during the advance  voting period from 24 February to 2 March. Despite concerns raised by some interlocutors, the OSCE/ODIHR EAM in general found widespread trust in the conduct of the Internet voting by the National Electoral Committee (NEC). However, there is scope for further improvement of the legal framework, oversight and accountability, and some technical aspects of the Internet voting system.

However there are some details which make the situation smell strangely:

(page 11): During the counting, one vote was determined invalid by the vote counting application since it was cast for a candidate who was not on the list in the corresponding constituency. The project manager could not explain how this occurred – the investigation was still ongoing at the time of issuing the report.

A student demonstrated that the client-side voting application “was flawed and could make it possible for a virus to block a vote without the voter knowing that any interference had occurred”:
http://news.err.ee/Politics/bbb598aa-586b-4981-9f7e-88273b5a25c0

The report mentions various other questionable practices by the i-voting vendor (called “project manager”). I want to re-read the report, but it seems like Estonians may have privatized their elections…

Indeed privatisation is another reason to resist the introduction of e-voting, as it is much harder to scrutinise the processes and systems used. Another quote from the report rings alarm bells for me:

The vendor, Cybernetica AS, handed over the internet voting software to the NEC in December 2010. The OSCE/ODIHR [election monitoring mission] was informed that the [privately contracted] project manager was able to update the software of the Internet voting system until right before the elections started, and without a formal consent of the NEC. This was done without any formal procedure or documented acceptance of the software source code by the NEC, which limited the information on which version of the software was ultimately used.

More concerns:

As in previous elections, and despite the recommendation made by the OSCE/ODIHR in 2007, the time of casting a vote was recorded in a log file by the vote storage server along with the personal identification code of the voter. This could potentially allow checking whether the voter re-cast his/her Internet vote, thus circumventing the safeguards in place to protect the freedom of the vote.

…

The project manager accessed the servers for daily data maintenance and backup breaking the security seals and using a data storage medium employed also for other purposes. This practice could potentially have admitted the undetected intrusion of viruses and malicious software.

There were also weak disaster recovery processes in place and source code for the client application (only) could only be inspected after signing a non-disclosure agreement. In other words highly unsatisfactory and if anyone seriously challenged  the results it would be nigh on impossible for the Estonian election commission to prove that no tampering had occurred.

Read the full OSCE report [PDF]

Categories
notes from JK

Election debrief – some thoughts on the 2011 result in Brighton & Hove

Well that was exhausting! We have emerged from the largest ever Green campaign in Brighton & Hove with the first ever Green-led council in UK history. An incredible achievement building on Caroline Lucas’ election as the UK’s first Green MP last May.

It takes an awesome number of voluntary contributions for a small political party to achieve these kinds of results. It’s impossible to thank everyone who gives their time and skills to support a campaign they believe in. It’s an incredible thing to see and understand that wave of support we’ve had in the past few years. Thank you to each person who has helped us, no matter how big or small their contribution.

As someone who has been deeply involved in the party’s electoral strategy since about 2007 it is quite gobsmacking to see our ambition and our plans realised. Of course things were not straightforward, plans had to be adjusted and so on. Still, we have effected real change. A party with a very different culture and values to the others is for the first time in administration. Real change is possible. I’m involved in all this because I believe this is one of the best ways to change the world for the better.

Now we need to deliver for the people of this city. Thankfully, we have an excellent detailed manifesto to work from, and also the goodwill of many people and organisations around the city.

And no doubt we’ll need their support because we face many challenges: We’ll be a minority administration and our group has 14 new councillors out of 23 and we will have to deal with the cuts and changes the national Conservative-led government will impose on us.

Our group of councillors elected me to be the Cabinet Member for Finance & Central Services. I am humbled by the trust they have put in me to serve the city with this portfolio. Expect more blogging from me in the future on the areas covered by my portfolio.

A quick comment on the election campaign itself: It was disappointing how few hustings there were, it did feel that the local election didn’t really capture the public imagination. I think Labour made a real error, as they did last year over who could win in Pavilion, in claiming only they could form the next council administration. They have further tarnished their name by making claims which have been shown to be untrue. I hope they will reflect on that and hope we can work together constructively whenever we find common ground in the coming 4 years.

For now I’m catching up on sleep, spending time with my family and getting up to speed on all the departments I’ll be responsible for.