Tag: elections

After a long absence — and very little presence even then — the red nest’s Action Team (sic) have made a reappearance, though their ‘action’ amounts to no more than dropping a leaflet through my letterbox. They have a strange concept of ‘working hard’. They have, apparently, been

working together to keep the Westcott Place Post Office open.

They’ve clearly not been working very well, as their colleague Ms Snelgrove has consistently voted in favour of post offices being closed. One of their other claims is rather odd too.

Stop the diversion of town traffic onto Central’s residential roads.

Being a rather narrow ward reaching into the town centre, do they really expect the main roads in Central not to carry town centre traffic? There are very few side streets offer any diversion into the town centre either, so this just reads like scaremongering. Perhaps they’re thinking of the impact of the proposed canal, which would lead to greater traffic in Broadgreen, but less at the Westcott end of the ward. Is it too much to expect that a ward candidate might one day campaign as if there is more to Central than Broadgreen?

As for their other claims of action, they’re indisinguishable from claims made by the other parties.

Now both the main parties are at it. Just a few days after the red nest brought in yet another minister to meet and greet in the town, now the blue nest have brought in a shadow minister, again to meet and greet, in Parks ward where most of the ministerial visitors have spent most of their visits.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned but, when deciding which candidate to vote for in the council elections, I couldn’t care less what ministers and their shadows have to say. This is a local election, not a national one, and, for once, there are quite a few local issues to be debated, such as waste and recycling services, town centre regeneration, and the canal proposals.

It seems that the parties are so busy showing their parliamentary colleagues around Parks ward that so far they’ve had little time to enter the local debate on the doorstep in the rest of the borough. If parties concentrate campaigning effort on ‘key’ marginal wards and take the elctorate elsewhere for granted, they shouldn’t be surprised if the result is voter apathy.

It’s not just the recent weather that has been unseasonal. The run-up to this year’s local elections has also been unusually quiet. But at least we have the list of candidates now (and despite having ‘2004’ in the link it is for this year). It looks a little more local than usual, with three of the Central ward candidates living in the ward itself: Kevin Leakey, David Cox and Eric Bagwell. The other two are a little more remote: Hannah Pajak from Old Town and Junab Ali from Freshbrook. Apart from that all we have to judge the candidates on are a couple of manifestos, from the blue and red nests. The blue nest are long on what they have done, but short on what they will do in the future. The red nest accuse the blues of wasting money on a canal… only to suggest spending on investigating whether trams should be introduced into Swindon. Now that’s far more likely to cause ‘traffic chaos’ than a canal down one road ever will.

The flow of ministers to prop-up the local red nest’s election campaign continues. This time ’tis Mr Dhanda who, like his Swindon colleagues, is a committed hypocrite, campaigning against his own party’s post office closures. He’s also a practitioner of the red nest habit of making glib claims of their achievements, when all the facts show the opposite.

Tackling problem behaviour is something the Labour Government is committed to. We are on the side of hard-working families and that is something clearly visible here in Swindon.

Releasing convicted criminals early after only half their sentence, as introduced by the red nest government’s early release scheme, is an odd approach to ‘tackling problem behaviour’. And in case Mr Dhanda hasn’t noticed, one thing the Broadgreen area is lacking is families (hard-working or not), having the highest density of houses in multiple occupation (i.e. bedsits) in Swindon. The hard-working single people that frequently occupy those bedsits are neglected by politicians of all colours.

I’m not sure who’s in charge at the Adver but just a day after Mr Brown launched the red nest’s local election campaign emphasising increases in community policing, the Adver has chosen to highlight the very same thing. However, much though the red nest like to crow about how much of our money they poor into various activities and gimmicks, what matters are results. The evidence at the moment is that all the extra money spent on Police Community Support Officers has had no tangible benefit.

Spending our money and getting nothing as a result is something I would hope no local politician would be proud of. I fully expect to be disappointed over the coming month.

Yesterday I received a letter through the post from Ms Snelgrove. Not the most local affair, having been printed in London and with a return address on the envelope in Newcastle upon Tyne. Apparently, she’s had an

Action Team in Central to listen to your concerns about anti-social behaviour and the mounting rubbish on your streets.

The letter even solicits for volunteers to her ‘Keep Central Clean and Safe Team’. Ms Snelgrove seems not to realise that listening is not itself action. Even if it were, her ‘team’ have been most noticeable by their absence. The rubbish is now subsiding, especially since the council started putting little orange ‘Council aware’ labels on bags of rubbish left for days on the streets. The rubbish was ‘mounting’ on the streets several months ago, when Ms Snelgrove’s ‘Keep Central Clean and Safe Team’ didn’t even exist… not that there’s any evidence it exists at all. There’s no evidence of in on the local red nest’s website, nor on Ms Snelgrove’s.

The only things that are mounting now are the local election campaigns… and Ms Snelgrove’s hypocrisy. Real action speaks much louder than words.

With a little flurry of leaflets (three in fact) from our local blue egg, it seems that the local election campaign is off to an early start. As is traditional in Swindon election leaflets, there’s a couple of photographs of the candidate standing in front of some graffiti tags. (I wonder if the taggers get a buzz from having their handiwork feature in election bumf.) In addition, there are mentions of the canal (nice idea but concerns about the local impact), town centre redevelopment (though I’m not quite sure why Central will be the ‘envy of the rest of Swindon’ when the vast majority of the development is in Eastcott), an invitation to sign a petition against post office closures (which is a little late seeing as the consultation period has just ended) and an oh-so-toned-down comment about the problems with waste collections.

I’m sure if I just replaced the photographs and the colour of the ink, I’d get a close approximation of the leaflets I’ll be getting from the other parties over the coming months.

No sooner have I finished writing of an example of Michael Wills’ struggle with reality, than another instance comes to my attention. This time, it’s Mr Wills, as Electoral Policy Minister, commenting on the Electoral Commission’s report on the electronic voting trials in May.

The purpose of pilots is to learn lessons for the future and we will do so…. We are pleased that the evaluations point to a high level of system security and user confidence in e-voting systems tested and that the security and integrity of the polls was not compromised.

Err? Let me quote from the commission’s report. Page 4 of the Key Findings and Recommendations Summary Paper:

[T]here was insufficient time available to implement and plan the pilots, and the quality assurance and testing was undertaken too late and lacked sufficient depth. The level of implementation and security risk involved was significant and unacceptable. There remain issues with the security and transparency of the solutions and the capacity of the local authorities to maintain control over the elections.

and again, this time from page 5:

In Swindon, pre-polling day end-to-end testing of the wireless electronic polling station network did not take place at all, which exposed the pilot scheme to an unacceptable level of risk.

Just which parts of ‘security risk involved was significant and unacceptable’ and ‘exposed the pilot scheme to an unacceptable level of risk’ does Mr Wills not understand? Just in case there’s any doubt as to where prime responsibility for these problems lies (seeing as Mr Wills is so fond of piling blame onto Swindon Council), one more quote, from page 5 again.

Although the MoJ undertook its own quality assurance through a security audit, this took place far too late. In some cases, the audit was conducted too close to the count or ‘going live’ date, which meant that, realistically, there was not enough time to make any significant changes following the audit. Clearly, it was incumbent on the suppliers to ensure that their solutions met the requirements of the framework. As noted earlier, however, these requirements were not rigorously enforced by the MoJ and by the time the audit took place it was too late.

Clearly, this government’s approach to learning lessons is to bury its head deep in the sand.

An independent group has published a report on the problems with the electronic voting system trialled in Swindon in the local council elections in May. Many of the problems identified in the report were already widely known immediately after the election and many of it’s more serious allegations (e.g. that people could have voted twice) were readily refuted by the deputy returning officer. Others were not. Of particular concern are the lack of security

POs [Presiding Officers] were tasked with collecting laptops and other equipment relating to the setup and operation of polling stations. POs are expected to lead the opening and running of their polling station with security a primary concern. It is therefore surprising, given the security concerns that should accompany the use of computers in elections, that POs were allowed to take the laptops for voting home with them one day or more before the election. This provided considerable time for potentially malicious or fraudulent modifications to the laptops, by POs and others to whom they could have given access.

and lack of scrutiny.

In South Bucks and Swindon votes were downloaded and counted on computers controlled by supplier’s staff without any candidate, agent or observer able to examine the process…. In Swindon, CDs were delivered which were said to have the e-votes on them, but nobody had observed the votes being downloaded to the disks or seen what had happened to them until they were inserted into ‘clean’ machines at the count which, attendees were told, decrypted and counted the votes.

Also surprising, from the deputy returning officer’s response to the report, is just how many were expected to vote electronically.

We reduced the number of manual counting staff by about 50 people as we expected 40 per cent of the electorate to vote electronically, but only 24 per cent did.

Given that turn-out is highest amongst the elderly, lowest amongst those in their teens and twenties, to have expected almost half of active voters to change the habit of a lifetime and embrace the new technology was very optimistic.

I’d have thought it was obvious that those who had chosen not to vote online and turned up on election day at the polling station would, in most cases, prefer to vote in the conventional manner. A few moments to put a cross on a piece of paper, or over a minute to work through several screens of an online system? Rather a no-brainer, isn’t it? Apparently not to those at Swindon Borough Council that were presiding over the election. Not only were some polling stations completely unready, initially, for those wishing to put a cross in a box on a ballot paper, but even when they were ‘correctly’ set-up, laptops in booths outnumbered blunt, short stumpy pencils hanging in booths by five-to-one in many cases. And the need for people to assist voters with the electronic voting added two extra staff to most polling stations compared with previous years.

Then there was the fragility of the communications system. I’m prepared to accept (just) that the unreliability of the wireless communications from the polling stations could not have been foreseen, but were wireless connections, from urban polling stations, really necessary?

After some extra checks, necessitated by the breakdown in communication, the electronic votes were finally delivered two and a half hours after the paper votes had been counted. And the benefit of all this new technology making it ‘easier’ to vote? A turnout slightly down on last year.