The Fianna Fáil chairman of an Oireachtas Committee is to write to the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, expressing concern about the electronic voting system after an academic said voters could not trust the system.
The Kildare TD, Mr Seán Power, who chairs the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Environment and Local Government, said he would ask Mr Cullen to spend no more money on the system until the Committee had finished examining the plans.
With the Government planning to use the €38 million system at polling stations throughout the State in the local and European elections next June, Mr Power said the Committee wanted to hear from officials at Mr Cullen's Department next Thursday.
He was speaking after a computer scientist from the National University of Ireland at Maynooth, Ms Margaret McGaley, told the committee that the system should modified radically if it was to be used in the elections.
She said "absolutely not" when when asked whether the system should be used in the elections without being changed, and added that voters must assume that errors were possible.
Ms McGaley warned that it was possible to programme the machine to check for votes for a particular party and change the vote to another party. Such a system could transfer every fifth vote. She said it was impossible to verify that the system was safe because the Government had refused to publish the "source code" of the computer system for a transparent public audit.
Ms McGaley, who is working on a PhD on electronic voting, is founder the Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-Voting, a lobby group which aims to convince the Government that the system as planned "poses a genuine threat to our democracy".
It was not enough for Mr Cullen or the Government or the Opposition to be satisfied with the system, she said. "The electorate must be satisfied. As it stands the proposed system is not worthy of their trust."
The greatest problem with the system was that the results could not be independently verified.
"If the proposed system is not behaving as it should - either by accident or malicious tampering - effects on vote outcomes might never be detected."
Ms McGaley said the system should be modified so that a paper record should be made of every vote taken. These official records of votes would could also be used for spot-checks or recounts.
Two computer experts, who are Labour party members, also made a presentation warning of that the Government system was unsafe.
Mr Robert Cochran said the system was not transparent to voters or to an audit process. The concerns of independent consultants to the Government were "largely ignored" by the Government, he said.
His colleague, Mr Shane Hogan, said the basic steps to manage the system were not documented in the guide for returning officers during the trial of the system in the general election last year.
The independent TD, Mr Jackie Healy-Rae, predicted that voters unfamiliar with computers would make mistakes during the rush to vote in the final hour of polling.
