No Overall Control

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

By the Gods! There are but weeks remaining for the third year politics students. Next significant deadline is the 13th March, the hand-in for New Radical Political Economy (NRPE) and Liberalism and Its Critics. I’ve just finished my NRPE paper, ‘To what extent do social, peer-to-peer and participatory models democratise capital’, so this week I’ll be devoting to my Dissertation project which has received somewhere between little and no attention since I wrote my proposal back in October…...

News that Ralph Nader has announced plans to run again for the US presidency got me googling like crazy this afternoon… Just to share with you the “Beastie Boy Ad Rock’s remix of Green Party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s blistering critique of the news media and the current state of American politics.” Posted to the Guerrilla News Network (GNN). Turn it up. ...

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. ...

I spend a lot of time in Gladstone Park and I’ve recently taken an interest in the state of Dollis Hill House. I think that the kindest word to describe the building is ‘wreak’. There are plans (there are always plans) to restore the house from the Dollis Hill House Trust in partnership with Training For Life. I’m not sure what they are in detail… but the appear to involve getting a whole bunch of money together to renovate the building into a venue of some kind - better than flats… no worse than demolition....