We’re still paying for the e-voting cock-up, but don’t expect apologies

ONE might have thought that those who were responsible for the electronic voting debacle would have learnt some humility from the experience.

It appears that this is not the case if we are to judge from an interview with Moncia Leech in one of last weekend’s Sunday newspapers. Her name will be familiar to readers because she used to be communications adviser to Martin Cullen when he was the Minister for Environment and Local Government and at the time there was much controversy about her contract.

She currently works as chief executive of Waterford Chamber of Commerce and last weekend’s interview was in the context of a campaign to have Waterford’s Institute of Technology designated a university.

However, the interview also dealt with many of the communications projects she was involved with during her time in the Department of Environment. There was much about successful communication strategies during her time there, in particular the Race Against Waste campaign.

Inevitably, however, the interviewer also had questions for her about the proposed introduction of e-voting which certainly cannot be seen as a success in either political or communications terms.

Ms Leech, however, was not prepared to attribute that fiasco to any communications errors. Rather she maintained that opponents of what she still sees as a reforming proposal had too much “sentimentality” for “the old ways” and that its abandonment in 2004 was a “triumph of ignorance”.

If there is something familiar about the language Ms Leech now uses to criticise those who opposed Cullen’s e-voting plans, then it is because this is precisely the type of vitriol which he himself deployed during the spring and early summer of 2004. Cullen’s Dáil speeches and media interviews of the time were full of bitter and over-the-top attacks, much of it suggesting that those who dared to oppose him were backward-looking or uniformed.

At the time many people (including many senior politicians in his own party getting nervous about the public backlash he was creating in the weeks leading up to the local and European elections) were wondering why some of Cullen’s advisers didn’t take him aside and rein in his rhetoric.

A cleverer communications strategy would have sought to reassure the public with information rather than dismissing public concerns. Instead of just shouting down opposition, his colleagues argued Cullen should at least attempt to maintain some degree of cross-party support on the issue. If we are to judge from the tenor of her comments two years later, it appears that far from toning him down or advising a softer approach, Cullen’s communication adviser was in full agreement with his bullish approach.

Far from being a triumph of ignorance, as Leech suggests, the successful campaign against Cullen’s e-voting proposal was a victory for commonsense over arrogance and bombast. It’s worth recalling for the record how the e-voting project for the local and European elections in 2004 came to be abandoned.

The ultimate decision to pull the plug on it was made by the Government in the first week of May after a special Commission on Electronic Voting had concluded in its preliminary report that it could not stand over it because sufficient tests had not been carried out to confirm the system’s secrecy and accuracy. Far from coming to this view out of ignorance, the commission did so after as detailed a study of the system as they could undertake in the limited time available to them.

Neither can the commission members be said to be persons ignorant of their subject - far from it. The commission was chaired by a High Court judge chosen because he is the same judge who chairs the Standards in Public Life Commission. The clerk of the Dáil and the clerk of the Seanad are also members - both know a thing or two about voting and elections.

The other two members of the commission are Danny O’Hare, chair of the Information Society Commission, and Brian Sweeney, chair of Siemens Ireland, both chosen because of their standing and skills in the IT area.

The decision to establish this independent commission was made by the cabinet some weeks previously because they were not satisfied with the reassurances Cullen was giving them about the system, or at least were certain that the public would never be satisfied by them.

Far from being stoked up by ignorance, the public concerns about Cullen’s e-voting proposals was informed by a campaign largely put together by experts. The NUI Maynooth academic and computer scientist Margaret McGaley, and her colleagues in their ad hoc group, undertook months of diligent work before May 2004 getting the message out about the technological concerns with the proposed system and about the need for a voter-verified audit trail.

As the same time an IT consultant, Joe McCarthy, who was also an experienced tallyman, managed though persistent use of the Freedom of Information Act - all of it at his own expense - to pull back the veil of secrecy and ignorance surrounding the preparation for the e-voting system and exposed many flaws.

SIMULTANEOUSLY, many in the media, political science academics and others involved in elections pointed out that what was being proposed by Cullen was a solution to a problem that did not exist.

They argued that the haphazard introduction of a flawed system was gambling unnecessarily with public confidence in our electoral process. Many of them also warned against the unnecessary abolition of the dramatic election count weekends which are part of our democracy and have served as a useful means of educating the public about our complicated voting system and of motivating them to participate in it.

The debate now about what happened to Cullen’s e-voting proposal in 2004 would not matter so much if it were not for the fact that we are still living with its consequences. The public purse is down at least €60 million on these e-voting machines which, despite the maintenance of a charade to the contrary, will never be used in an Irish election.

We are also still paying the storage costs of Martin Cullen’s mistake. Although the system was originally Noel Dempsey’s idea, it was Cullen who brought the decision to cabinet to spend tens of millions more on a nationwide system of machines at a time when the public finances were tight.

Even if the Government manages to centralise storage for the machines in some military or other location, as is being suggested, then the costs will continue to run into the hundreds of thousands until ultimately they accept reality and seek to sell on the machines.

The Commission on Electronic Voting is still at its work two years later - itself a testament to the fact that those who raised concerns about the system, far from being ignorant, were right on the button (excuse the pun). The commission is due to publish a further report in a few weeks, and in a recent interview the current Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, appeared to suggest that it will not be a ringing endorsement and may in fact bring the decision on the ultimate scrapping of the system to a head.

Mr Roche is a practical man who has shown an informed approach to decision -making since he took over the Environment brief. Once he has the commission’s new report he should have the courage to stand up and accept that the e-voting project was badly handled, scrap it and move on to other important reforms like improving our electoral register.

Someday when the technology is sufficiently secure and transparent, we will have e-voting. When that times comes, whichever minister is introducing it will have to overcome even greater public reluctance because of the 2004 debacle.

Let’s hope he or she has access to better communications advice.