Councillor’s voting system ‘potential data breach’

A SENIOR councillor created an online voting system that could have potentially tracked how members voted on budget cuts.

The potential data breach was noticed by opposition members in Pembrokeshire council – which has no one political party in overall control – after Councillor Alec Cormack sent out a link to an external site. Councillors received an email containing an individual link from Mr Cormack, who is the council’s cabinet member for finance, ahead of a budget seminar on January 27.

The council must cut spending to save £28m in the 2023-24 financial year and councillors will have to vote on budget proposals. The individual links sent out to councillors took them to an external website, pembs. net, which included information about potential financial savings for the forthcoming budget, and another page for councillors to vote on various options.

Despite the fact the email was sent from Mr Cormack’s council email address, the external website was hosted on a server that includes a number of websites, including one for his own IT business and Pembrokeshire Liberal Democrats.

Realising the potential for the site to track confidential responses, councillors refused to vote and raised their concerns during the budget seminar, held at County Hall in Haverfordwest. They feared that, as the administrator of the site, Mr Cormack was theoretically able to record each and every member’s interactions, which it was claimed would amount to a breach of trust.

It is not clear why the website was set up externally rather than on the council’s own server. Mr Cormack declined to comment when asked about the concerns, and referred all inquiries to Pembrokeshire council.

A Pembrokeshire County Council spokesman said: “As a result of the concern raised, the platform was not used and we are looking into whether there may have been any information security or other breaches.”