Until recently, I had never heard of a company called Idox and I suspect that few British people have heard of it either. Yet, it should be known by everyone. The reason that it is not well known is because much of our media is no longer independent and does not hold the government to account.
Idox is a private company whose primary aim is to serves its customers. So, why is it now involved in UK elections, when elections are about constituents and not customers? That is the question that the mainstream media should be asking but don’t hold your breath. In terms of UK elections, the Idox customer is the UK State and if that does not represent a massive conflict of interest, then I do not know what does? The earliest time that I know about, where Idox had an involvement in a UK election, was back in 2012, when it was used in Scotland to provide 'count software' and to 'manage postal votes'. One of Idox’s senior non-executive directors is former Tory MP Peter Lilley (please see the link below to an article from the ‘The Herald’). His connection to the company has generated concerns that have been raised with the Electoral Commission. However, Peter Lilley’s involvement misses the point, which is why Idox or any other private company is allowed to participate in any UK elections in the first place? http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14478267.Concerns_raised_over_senior_Tory_MP_link_to_election_count_firm/ When there were elections in the past, council workers would count the votes. Now, it seems that councils struggle with the availability of staff, which is why Idox says that its services are needed. But how did this happen? Why are council workers no longer available to provide manual counts? What has brought this series of events about and who thought that utilising private companies was a good solution? If you speak to a computer expert, they will tell you that if a computer is connected to the internet, it can never be secure. Forget passwords, firewalls, encryption and the like, if a computer is connected to the internet, it is vulnerable and therefore so is its data. However, Idox will try to convince you otherwise, even though it has already been found to have compromised data that should never have been released. Please see the article below (another from ‘The Herald’), which explains that a data leak took place because of a problem with an Idox platform that was used to host electoral roll data. It also points out that the largest shareholder in Idox is a company called Liontrust Asset Management, which is run by Sir John Beckwith, who also happens to be one of the largest donors to the Tory party. http://files.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/15299358.IT_firm_handling_Scottish_elections_leaked_data/ How can Idox be trusted with the UK’s electoral process when the problem highlighted above was not an isolated example? Please see the article below from the Daily Mail. It explains how in 2014, an Idox ‘software error’ led to the leak of millions of names and addresses on the electoral role. Furthermore, this ‘error’ affected 90 councils around England and Wales (approximately 25% of the total for both countries combined). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2623853/Electoral-roll-data-leaked-Millions-names-addresses-illegally-sold-junk-mail-firm.html Below is a link to a promotional video by Idox, where Glasgow City Council recommends its services. Why a city council is being used to endorse a private company in this way, I do not know. However, I have only been able to provide a link to the video because the video owner will not allow it to be embedded into websites that it does not control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-7ybYfSjZw While I do not want to criticise the staff in the video, who probably believe what they are saying, I strongly disagree with the statements made. In particular, I do not see the need for electronically counting votes. The old system of using council workers to count votes worked perfectly well before and while it is not as fast as a computer, it is far less open to corruption than computer systems run by private interests. Finally, it is worth noting that Idox was used to count the EU referendum votes in Scotland. It must be a coincidence then that there were less votes for Leave north of the border than there were in the south.
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