Byte-ing the ballot

I went to one of the breakout rooms where there was a debate on E-voting and Democracy.

It was chaired by Michela Palese of the Electoral Reform Society who introduced a panel consisting of Areeq Chowdhury from Webroots Democracy & Prof Mark Ryan of Birmingham University, who supported the motion that E-Voting was good and Louise Ferguson of the ORG and Ross Anderson from the Foundation for Information Policy Research who were more sceptical.

Chowdhury’s argument is based on convenience and accessibility.

Ryan was more nuanced and firstly posed the question of time scales, I am unclear if he believes its possible to solve the issue, or that it might become so, that a single system can be built that offers transparency of a result and secrecy of ballot, but he did raise the question of if we can do banking why not elections and answered it in that remediating banking errors is easy compared with remediating a flawed and broken election. The latter is an issue we should all understand because of the Brexit referendum but we should recognise that IT errors caused the failure of Greenwich Nat. West and nearly brought down Knight Capital, so some banking errors are not so easy to remediate.

Ryan quoted Australia, Estonia and the US as places where e-voting is used, but there are problems in all three countries, some of it reported in this blog and much of it catalogued in Chapter 23, “The Bleeding Edge” pages 759-763 of Prof. Ross Anderson’s book, “Security Engineering”.

Ferguson argued that IT does not solve the access problems but did not mention the digital divide. She also addressed the issue of the anti-democratic nature of the adtech industry due to its opaque bidding structures. She argued to ban adverts during elections; it’s a reflection of the arguments made in the TU and Labour movements that postal balloting puts the power in the hands of the press, in particular the Murdoch press. She was also the first person to raise the issue of the unlimited use of postal votes and the extension of the vote to ex-pats. Both these initiatives can be seen to have been done for partisan reasons, but the ex-pat thing has blown up in the Tory’s faces as they seek to regain their votes in the referendum and British citizens in Pakistan claim the same rights as those living on the Costa-del-Sol.

These motivations led me to note that no-one is talking about coercion and personation.

Ross Anderson also opposing started his speech with the statement that elections and democracy have a long kill chain. I am not sure if that’s the right use of the term, but I need to read a bit more before I get into an argument with him. He identified determining who can vote, issues of impersonation, vote capture and counting all as areas where as I.T. is introduced, more vulnerabilities come with it.  He is adamant that there must be a paper trail to ensure the count is verifiable. Much of what he thinks he has put into his book, “Security Engineering” and elections are covered in Chapter 23, pages 759-763. Anderson also attacked the political parties for opening their leadership franchises to their memberships and is particularity hostile to Ed Miliband in letting people vote for £3.

In summing up, the Chair and Ferguson stated that the real answer is political culture, involving both voting to elect governments, but that governments should distribute decision making to local authorities and citizen assemblies and juries.

Someone spoke of the Trade Unions using e-voting systems, in fact they don’t and for many of their ballots, it is prohibited, so I set them right.

So that I didn’t feel to far away from home, someone raised a Point of Order on the vote about the time scales at which benefits to e-voting might accrue, probably a LibDem but the motion was crushed. People that understand don’t like it. …

Charter for a better Building Society industry

I was tidying up came across some paper work documenting the Charter for an open & democratically accountable building society industry. When googling it the only reference I came across was the labour Party’s policy forum mirror. If a member of the Labour Party or otherwise have a login to the Policy Forum site, site you might like to vote it up; it has more comments than votes but it also plays to the issue of control of the banks.

History teaches me that mirroring the charter here is probably a good idea, because I can no longer find it on the BSMA site. …

Lewisham’s Democracy, it could be better

Lewisham’s Democracy, it could be better

Writing up what I think for Lewisham’s Democracy Review is proving harder than I thought, the source material i.e. Lewisham’s Constitution [www] is very long(483 pages), it’s .pdf, can’t easily be indexed or highlighted, so item No. 1. is to increase the transparency of the rules so citizens can understand how decisions are made.

This is a very Un-British way of doing things and all our instincts are wrong. Every decision is reserved for the Mayor who must present a number of plans to full council. the decisions are then taken in the context of the agreed plans which only require ⅓ voting in favour. The Mayor delegates all their executive functions to the Cabinet as a collective but also to the council’s principal paid officers. The backbench Councillor’s Scrutiny Committees can only delay these decisions. There, apart from criminal sanction, is no way to recall the Mayor. The Mayor does not hold office due to their ability to command a majority, they do not need to get many decisions agreed by Council. This is not just a first-amongst-equals “Leader” with a different mandate, it’s an alien form of government, lifted from the US & France and designed to reduce the accountability of the decisions from people and their political parties.

My first proposal would be that the Council agree to ask the people of Lewisham to abolish the Mayor and return to a collective committee led Council. It might seem to be less democratic but a committee led council has to maintain its mandate throughout it’s term of office, a Mayor led council supported by a just ⅓ of the Councillors can ignore civic society and wait for the next election.

The other ideas I need to develop,  and we’ll see how much detail I can research, would cover Recall, maybe requiring a more than 50% vote of the Council, Term Limits, something about an Ombudsman & Compliance Committee and independence, having the Cabinet appointed by the Council, the move to a Green Paper/White Paper process for decision making, improved citizen communication, the web site is shite, smaller wards and some thing on the need to use the powers in the Localism Act to get the changes in law that some of these things would require. …

One Man Rule

While talking to a friend, about Lewisham Council’s Democracy Review, I came to the conclusion that while I have opposed Executive Mayors because I feel the Labour Party is incapable of holding them i.e. Labour Mayors to account to their manifesto promises, actually the Council can’t do that either; it doesn’t have the tools; Scrutiny can only delay a decision and every decision except planning and licensing is taken by the Mayor. 💩

I need to look into the law and see if this can be changed/improved within the context of a Mayoral system, but as you may know my preference is a return to committee led councils. …

How democratic is the UK?

While writing and thinking about Labour Party governance, I asked myself the question how does one measure democraciness?  My reading for that article pointed me at two data sets that allow one to answer this question for Nation States. These are the Polity IV index and the Economist Information Unit’s Democracy Index. The key white paper for Polity IV is, CONCEPTUALIZING AND MEASURING DEMOCRACY Evaluating Alternative Indices, by MUNCK & VERKUILEN, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2002 and the Economist defines its methodology in this paper, The Economist Intelligence Unit’s index of democracy by Laza Kekic dated 2007 which lists their 60 attributes of democracy.

I have decided to examine the Economist’s methodology to see if it can be used to help understand the democraciness of non-Nation State entities. However, I went through the questions and scored the UK according to my own judgements. The rest of this article looks at the Economist’s methodology and my findings about the UK’s democracy. …  …

Democracy in the EU and the Trilemma

While writing up the last article, I also looked at “Labour’s Brexit trilemma: in search of the least bad outcome” on the Open Democracy web site. It refers to Rodrik’s trilemma., which was designed to examine the Bretton Woods currency regulations and the international trade regime it spawned.  I have marked up the first of these article with what I think are the interesting bits on diigo which can be viewed here. The OD article adopts the trilemma and sees a Lexit option as maximising (national) democracy and national control of economic policy and poses it against a “remain and reform” position which it argues maximises economic integration.

My biggest problem with the trilemma, which was designed to describe the Bretton Woods global currency regime is that it seems to believe that the UK’s democracy is superior to that of the EU. Within the EU, British Citizens are protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights and EU’s Court, which as I an others have mentioned is chock full of the children of the opponents of fascism and Stalinism. It is also a republican construct without a House of Lords, without First Past the Post and without a hereditary Head of State. The people elect the European Parliament, the biggest party in the Parliament nominates the President of the Commission, the members of the Council and Commission are nominated by member state governments and the latter are confirmed and can be removed by the Parliament.

The Open Democracy article, also asks some tough questions of the Lexiters, not the least important being what makes you think that a more independent UK can manage Capital and the economy more effectively; it is clear that the Bexiters in the Tory Party don’t believe this. It also points the impossibility of being independent; the WTO places constraints on Trade Policy and if we want to sign a Trade Agreement with the EU, most of their same red lines will exist. …

Politics as a Platform. Not!

In an article on Open Democracy, entitled “Digital parties on the rise: a mass politics for the era of platforms”, Paulo Gerbaudo writes of the growth of Politics as a Platform based on ideas from his new book Digital Parties: Political Organisation and Online Democracy The article’s subtitle is, “The old party system appears in serious distress, faced with challengers using digital technology as a means to achieve the utopian goal of a more democratic society”. There’s more below/overleaf … …

Pathbreakers?

My copy of the Economic Journal arrived last week, and an article, “Pathbreakers? Women’s Electoral Success and Future Political Participation” by Bhalotra, Clots-Figueras & Iyer caught my eye. Are successful women political role models and do they have coat-tails? The answer in India it would seem is no! They hang around and other women do not follow them, whether out of solidarity, or due to a seemingly unassailable queue it is unclear although it would seem that power does not like to be shared; the problems are institutional and not based in gender biases although where gender bias exists within the party and the general public, men it seems retaliate.

This is pretty interesting. If there are similar factors in the UK, then maybe we should consider term limits and in the case of the Labour Party, it would be an argument for abolishing trigger ballots and having open selections, for women MPs as well as male ones. It would also be best if Labour revoked the introduction of trigger ballots for councillors.

ooOOOoo

Also interesting is their presentation of academic evidence that having more women politicians is good for women and children, but also for men.

Several recent papers document that increasing women’s political representation results in policy choices that are more favorable to women (Chattopadhyay and Duflo 2004, Rehavi 2012, Iyer et al. 2012), and that improve investments in children and lower corruption (Brollo and Troiano 2014, Bhalotra and Clots-Figueras 2014, Clots-Figueras 2012, Dollar, Fisman and Gatti 2001, Miller 2008, Swamy et al 2001). This suggests that women’s under-representation in political office disadvantages one half of society, and may have additional social costs.

Let’s note that lower corruption is a benefit for all, and that some investment houses score companies highly if they have a high number of female directors/mangers. …

Labour’s Democracy Review

Labour’s Democracy Review

Labour List reports the initialisation of the Labour Party’s “Democracy Review, together with some snide comments about its pace, suggesting that it is designed to  cement Corbyn’s leadership and succession rather than ensure it reports to the membership in time to debate the changes before conference.  They also publish the document passed at the OrgSub, also available as a mirror from this site.

The review will work in three phases, liberation organisation and autonomy, organisation & structure.

The first phase, about the Liberation Groups is planned to end by 12th Jan. One of the drivers for this is almost certainly the need to have new systems in place when the NEC Youth Rep is to be elected, and the need to rerun the election for the BAME representative on the NEC. From my conversations though I know that our BAME members have more to say.

The paper says there will be a hub, presumably a wiki at which members, CLPs and affiliates will be able to access the consultation questions and respond, there will also be an email address, (presumably for those without a browser) which is less satisfactory as any contributions become secret. The paranoid amongst us, assume that by not having a closed membership open wiki, where members can set the agenda, they are building a means of control. …

We have a choice

We have a choice

The events of the weekend have led me to the conclusion that my review of the manifestos as they relate to the internet and civil liberties were too factual and too dry. Over the weekend, three islamist terrorists attacked London with a white van and knives. It is now believed that at least one of them has been radicalised by Al-Muhajiroun a banned group and had been, yet again, notified to the security services and police. I suspect we’ll learn more over the next couple of days. This was a week after an attack in Manchester on a concert. Overnight the political parties agreed to suspend the campaign for the following day, but one of the parties broke that agreement. I look at the responses of May and Corbyn, linking to their speeches and analyse the meaning of the promise to deny the terrorists a safe space on the internet, to increase prison sentences together with the impact of the cuts to the police and intelligence service staff numbers.  …