Cullen e-vote fiasco leaves €50m bill

MARTIN Cullen was accused last night of wasting over €50 million after his electronic voting plans were scuppered by a devastating independent report.

The bill for the Minister for the Environment's e-voting rollout was labelled a scandalous waste of taxpayer's money that could have covered the cost of the Government's "Savage 16" social welfare cuts.

The Government was left reeling after the damning report confirmed all the warnings, despite the minister's combative dismissal of any criticism of the system's security and reliability.

Fighting off calls for his resignation, Mr Cullen said electronic voting will not be used in the local and European elections in June, but added he still intended to introduce it for future polls.

"Voter confidence in this system is absolutely essential. That is why we have pulled the system. At best there would be a lot of confusion," he said.

The Commission on Electronic Voting's report prompted the Government to pull the plug on e-voting after it found the system's reliability could not be established to its satisfaction.

In a severe blow to the minister's endorsement of the system, the commission also said testing identified a software error that could lead to incorrect results and that it was easy to bypass security measures to manipulate the count.

Mr Cullen regretted the outcome. But he said he did not believe the e-voting plans were rushed and added he would stay in his job. "We take the good days with the bad," he said.

Latest figures from the Department of the Environment, provided just 24 hours previously, show the cost of the rollout was estimated at €51.4 million.

Cabinet colleagues failed to come to the minister's defence and even the Taoiseach declined to comment upon the controversy as he left a European election fundraiser in Dublin.

Demanding an investigation by a public spending watchdog, Fine Gael environment spokesman Bernard Allen said the calls for Mr Cullen's resignation were realistic.

"The minister was reckless, arrogant, dismissive, abusive, he misled the Dáil repeatedly, he wouldn't consult and he wouldn't listen. This is nothing short of gross negligence," he said.

As his party colleagues described the fiasco as a scandalous waste of money and contrasted the €52 million budget to the €58 million social welfare cuts, Labour environment spokesman Eamon Gilmore said someone had to take responsibility for a mistake that had cost the taxpayer so much.