Criticism cannot be dismissed

DESPITE the tentative judgment by the Commission on Electronic Voting that it can recommend the machines but not the election management software, the Government’s claim that it was vindicated in spending so much on the system rings hollow.

So far, it has spent €52m on an electronic voting computer system it cannot use, and almost another €1m on storing and maintaining the machines.

To make the system workable would entail the expenditure of at least another €10m, and a phenomenal U-turn in voter confidence in the controversial voting system which has been consigned.

No matter how much he tries, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s defence of the Government and former Environment Minister Martin Cullen, who spearheaded the introduction of electronic voting, cannot dismiss the criticism levelled at it because ultimately it has wasted taxpayers’ money, and continues to waste it, on a hugely expensive project that it cannot use.

Apart from the waste of taxpayers’ money in such a contentious way, what is unconscionable is that the Government was prepared to jeopardise the election process by using an insecure method.

Over €4m was spent on a publicity campaign to sell it to the public by a government and minister determined to impose on the electorate an election system which could have imperilled that very fundamental process. Only because it attracted such unprecedented criticism from experts and the opposition was it referred to the commission and withdrawn.

It is difficult to imagine how any Government department could have been so wrong as the Department of the Environment was when, in 2000, it predicted that the system would bring savings of €13.8m over the course of 20 years.

Instead, it had a much more immediate and decimating economic impact, costing the taxpayers €52m plus €700,000 annually in storage, for a system that was withdrawn because it was inadequate to do what was expected of it.

That cost included €733,669 paid in a public relations contract to a firm part-owned by former Fianna Fáil general secretary Martin Mackin, and Jackie Gallagher, a former adviser to the Taoiseach.

It also transpires, as the Dáil Committee of Public Accounts was informed, that in Mr Cullen’s constituency the cost of storing the redundant machines is four times higher on average than anywhere else in the country.

The Comptroller and Auditor General John Purcell, in his annual report for 2003, had criticised the Government’s electronic voting project. It should have been, he said, subjected to more rigorous appraisal before it was bought because of the scale of the expenditure involved.

He was not the only one. The minister and the Government stubbornly ignored advice tendered by experts that the system as commissioned would not work properly because of the security aspect and the lack of a paper trail, and that the system was considered to be compromised.

Although used on a trial basis in the last General Election, the Commission on Electronic Voting would not recommend its use in the local and European elections in 2004.

Nothing has changed since the independent commission’s first report then.

Even before its report was published yesterday, the current Environment Minister Dick Roche announced last year that it was most unlikely that electronic voting would be used for next year’s General Election.