How I would have rigged the Goldsmiths College Student Elections and some recommendations for the future.

There are many ways of rigging an election and, with increased abstraction and dispersal of the act of voting, influencing the outcome of ballots gets easier and easier.

Let’s just think for a moment what takes place when a student votes. First of all, the student needs to be co-present with the ballot! This is a given and the only part of the process that can not be virtualised. The student presents some ID before being given a ballot paper. The ballot is privately completed and cast into the ballot box.

The Goldsmiths College Students Election e-Voting was extremely vulnerable to exploitation by someone with malicious intent. The e-voting mechanism virtualised the ballot paper instead of virtualising the whole process. Anyone visiting the goldsmithsstudents.com website was able to download a Microsoft Word file. This file used a macro to capture the input of the user; in this case the ranking of the preference of candidates. A student was expected to complete the form, save it, then send the file as an attachment from their college email account to su@gold.ac.uk

The most vulnerable part of the whole process is that single file made available for public download.

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How many twins can one university have? If Goldsmiths SU passes all of the resolutions before it on conjoining in solidarity with another university it’ll have a hard time buying trousers.

Some would have Goldsmiths twin with a university in Palestine and have campaigned tirelessly for 18 months. Others would see Goldsmiths twin with an Israeli institution and have brought out the votes to defeat motions in the past. Both condemn the other for their solidarity, their morality (or lack of it), their inequity…

Both sides seek absolute right and the destruction of the other… A grotesque caricature of only the most extreme elements of the conflict on which they hope to have some bearing.

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Plenty of keyboard time coming up over the next few weeks…

The dissertation project continues: are radical openness of f/los communities embodying resistance to Empire? My proposal was graded at 8/10 … must be doing something right. Now to maintain that effort!

Also researching a paper on social. p2p and participatory financial models with specific reference to banking systems. Zopa, Kiva and Open Capital are my case studies. Meeting with the CFO of Zopa tomorrow!

Reading: Empire, Multitude, several commentaries on Hardt & Negri, plenty of politics and post-structuralism. Phew!

Well… today was last day of term for two @smiths courses: Beyond All Reason and Culture, Globalisation and Power.

I’ve just finished uploading all my Beyond All Reason mindmaps… use with caution…. Click on for some links…

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