Nigel Farage claims Reform U.K. membership has surpassed that of the Tories’ and he’s got a website to prove it:
Kemi Badenoch claims it’s a fake. She says the website is just showing an ever-increasing number, nothing to do with actual membership. Who is right? And on what basis do they make their claims?
The Reform U.K. membership counter is on the internet where we can all see it, so let’s do a bit of sceptical enquiry. If we point our web browser at it, we see an occasionally updating counter. Open up the browser developer tools and we can see network traffic when the counter updates. Where is that traffic coming from?
Our browser is making a connection to a computer whose internet address is 3.11.10.26 or in more human friendly terms, pro-worker.reformparty.uk. If you try this, the IP address may be different, but it is always associated with the Reform UK domain name. That’s because the software developer has used Amazon’s elastic beanstalk service to cope with the expected traffic, so it is spread across multiple machines. Anyway, those machines are almost certainly controlled by Reform which means it is almost certainly running their software. By the way, those IP addresses are of U.K. based Amazon Web Services machines:
That indicates a U.K.-based deployer of the software, although that doesn’t prove much. The software could be a simple increasing counter or a real-time Stripe analytics package. But either one would have to be deployed by Reform.
So, the real question is what does the software do? It certainly gives back some data that says the “current total” is a particular number:
But where does that number come from? Software can do all sorts of things. Is it a random number generator? Or a count of the payments made to Reform’s Stripe account? Or a fully audited analysis of the Reform membership? From what is available on the public internet we cannot say.
Here at the Daily Sceptic we would be very interested to hear from the developer of the software as to what it actually does. One way to resolve this would be for Reform to open source that software. It is very likely in a repository on GitHub – just make it public (remove the secrets first guys, obvs). And proof of deployment would be good too. That would give us a very clear winner.
Stop Press: Reform U.K. has threatened legal action against Kemi Badenoch after she accused the party of faking its membership numbers, according to the Telegraph.
Stop Press 2: Reform U.K. hasn’t open sourced its software, but Nigel Farage claims the party has “opened” its “systems” to various newspapers and broadcasters “in the interests of full transparency”.
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