Proof of pudding is in the voting

Political Reporter Michael O’Farrell visits the Netherlands to see electronic voting in operation.

DEEP in the bowels of a town hall 30 kilometres from Amsterdam, technical expert Michael vol Bergh wipes the sweat from his forehead and swallows hard. Things are looking bad.

Hilversum, a town of 80,000, is holding a referendum to decide whether parking metres should be removed. The vote, in common with the vast majority of Dutch elections, is using the same Nedap electronic voting machines that are to be introduced in Ireland in two months.

But as an increasingly stressed Michael stares at his computer screen, sighs and pulls over his Nedap operating manual, it is evident something is wrong. By the time a call is finally made to the Nedap helpdesk, Nel Hoogmoed, the council official in charge of the referendum, is pacing the room repeating that there must have been a software problem.

To add to her problems, Q4 the Irish firm awarded the PR contract for the Government's roll-out of electronic voting has flown several Irish journalists to the Netherlands in a bid to finally get some positive press for a system beleaguered by negative publicity back home.

But although the Dutch use the same machines as those planned for Ireland, there are differences in how information is initially transferred from polling stations to the count centre and it is this that is causing problems.

In Ireland, cartridges from voting machines in polling stations will be brought to the count centre before being read. But in Holland, polling stations call the count centre by phone with preliminary results.

These results then become official when checked against the actual data in the cartridges from polling stations.

Initially, the system seems impressive. Polls close at 9pm and results are already being called in five minutes later. Within 15 minutes, 39 of the 40 polling stations have made contact.

Then it all begins to go wrong.

First, polling station number 40 fails to make contact the official there has forgotten his phone.

Finally, when, with the help of a neighbour, the result is called in from a house down the street, all that stands in the way of a preliminary result is the council's server and its Nedap software.

As the IT man Michael fumbles helplessly with his computer mouse, we are all ushered out of the room.

Ultimately, though, despite the glitches, a final official result is successfully announced just over an hour after polling has closed.

And there is no real concern about the computer failure. The integrity of the actual voting system itself was never called into question, just the phoned-in results.

A tired Ms Hoogmoed afterwards told reporters that she had complete faith in the Nedap voting machines.

"Probably there was a network failure because the computers were connected to the network and probably one of them didn't shut down properly. I think it was human failure," she said.

BEFORE the confusion of the count, Nedap director Jan Groenendaal was also utterly confident.

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating. And when it comes to usage, the Nedap voting machine is unmatched worldwide," he said.

And certainly in Holland, where electronic voting has been in use for close to 15 years, most seem to trust the system.

Mr Groenendaal is clearly frustrated at the fuss being made over electronic voting in Ireland.

"It brings a lot of extra work," he said, blaming so-called experts who do not know what they are talking about.

"Trust us," is his ultimate message. And given his company's track record, many probably would.

But, in contrast to Holland, where electronic voting was brought in with the agreement of all opposition parties after a long consultation period overseen by an electronic voting commission, the Irish Government has failed to bring opposition parties onside.

In addition, the fact that an Irish electronic voting commission was only lately appointed and concerns over Environment Minister Martin Cullen's role as Fianna Fáil's director of elections also served to increase suspicions.

Mr Groenendaal's problem is not so much that people are hesitant to trust his company. Instead, his main problem is that there is an increasing mistrust of the Government that no amount of fancy PR can rectify.