We’ve already got an e-vote back-up system
The argument that it will aid in sorting out proportional vote preferences is a red herring: all we need to do, once the votes are reliably counted and adjudicated, is to feed the results into a computer, in public, and it will distribute preferences for us in a fraction of a second.
Anybody else can repeat the figures on their own computer, if they so wish. As far as a paper trail of accountability is concerned, we already have a paper trail it's called a voting slip, isn't it?
Anybody familiar with computers knows that a program can be tampered with: what one person can program, another can hack into it.
The stakes are far too high to neglect the necessity for fail-safe backup; there is hard evidence of computer glitches and outright fraud from America and, crucially, for an administration to insist on replacing a verifiable system with an unverifiable one, against the best advice of experts and all commonsense, would be to undermine their own credibility.
Could the public be blamed for asking: "What's in it for them?"
Micheál Ó Fearghail,
Loreto,
Sallybrook House,
Glanmire,
Co Cork.
