A Detailed Examination of The Reform Party Ticker

I normally get paid for this, but it was worth it

So, I’m a software developer. I’m also a bit interested in politics. These things rarely go together.

This was put up by the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, in regards to Nigel Farage saying that Reform now had more members than the Conservatives:-

So… the ticker in question is at https://www.reformparty.uk/counter and it currently looks like this:-

What Kemi is referring to is a practice where a counter is shown, but it’s not really getting the data from a counter, instead the website is just doing some jiggery pokery to fake the numbers. Let’s explain the general architecture of websites like this, and how they should work.

So when you go and get a page, your browser is retrieving the code that runs inside the browser, this is what we call the client code. This shows the count. It should also be sending a message off to a server to ask for the count, and that application should get the numbers from the database to return to the client code.

If it’s being faked on the client, it won’t be making the call to the server. It might be using an algorithm to present a rising number. The general trick is something like you work out the number of seconds since a certain date, divide it by a value and it looks reasonable.

Is that what’s happening here? Well, at least as at the present, I can’t see that. This is what Chrome Tools are showing in the Network tab:-

And this matches the value, and those count values are coming through.

So, it does not appear from this to be algorithmic. Now, maybe the numbers on the server are fake, but I don’t know how Kemi Badenoch would know this. Maybe the code was different in the past. This is what the code does now:-

So, fetchCounts() gets the data from an api endpoint.

And I checked the oldest Internet Archive version, 22nd December

Now this is tricky as it’s compressed code, and hard to read, but I can see that fetchCounts() was still making an API call back then.

Next I wondered why it was only showing an archived version as old as the 22nd. Are only a limited number of days kept? I wasn’t sure, so I checked the internet archive for the main Reform UK site and that goes back further.

So, at what point does a link to the ticker appear? I went back to the 21st December, and the page looks like this:-

and this is what it looks like now:-

So from the publicly available information from Internet Archive, the ticker page only went up on the 22nd December 2024, and the oldest version of the Javascript for the site retrieved the data from the API from that date.

I also checked a few other archive entries, and the old code looks like it’s retrieving from the API.

Which means I’m struggling to see any evidence of the algorithmic tinkering that Kemi Badenoch is referring to. And I think I’ve covered everything. Maybe one of Kemi’s staff checked the code at the time between 2 Internet Archive saves and in the space of a couple of hours, the Reform team put the dodgy version up, and then took it down. Or maybe, UK users were being redirected differently.

Maybe… mayyybbbbeeee.