The head of the Government Department responsible for electronic voting has conceded that public confidence in the initiative has been damaged by the controversy surrounding the introduction of the €52 million system.
The secretary general of the Department of the Environment, Mr Niall Callan, remained confident the system would be used in future elections in spite of the Government decision not to use it for the elections last June.
While recognising that the tight timeframe for introducing the system may have limited his Department's ability to provide "fuller reassurance" about it, Mr Callan conceded that public confidence in the NedapPowervote system had fallen since initial surveys suggested a high level of voter satisfaction.
"That has been somewhat eroded by events. The level of support did not seem to be holding up as well."
Mr Callan was speaking at a lengthy hearing of the Dáil Committee of Public Accounts at which he made it clear that his Department was not in favour of a system with a voter-verifiable audit trail, as mooted by many critics of the system.
He confirmed that the Department's communications consultant, Ms Monica Leech, had a role in the evaluation of tenders for a contract to publicise the system which was won by Q4, a firm part-owned by Mr Jackie Gallagher, a former adviser to the Taoiseach, and the former general secretary of Fianna Fáil, Mr Martin Mackin.
Mr Callan said that contracts were awarded by consensus, however, adding that "influence" would be too strong a word to describe Ms Leech's role in deciding who won contracts in three tender processes.
The meeting heard repeated criticism of the Department's stewardship initiative from the committee chairman, Mr Michael Noonan, and other Opposition figures, criticism which Mr Callan rejected.
Mr Callan did not accept claims from the Fine Gael TD, Mr John Deasy, that falling public confidence in the system was evidence that the Department's actions in the project had produced the opposite result to the one it set out to achieve.
He believed the Government had invested in a viable system with a proven record of reliability and successful operation in EU states such as Germany and the Netherlands.
While stating that the Department developed the project actively and responsibly against "challenging real-time deadlines" set by the Government, Mr Callan also rejected Mr Noonan's assertion that the security of the system was inadequate.
In a submission to the committee prepared before the meeting, Mr Callan said his Department recognised in retrospect that "the timescale for a national roll-out of electronic voting may have limited our ability to consult as widely as we might have wished on the project".
He also accepted that there could have been advantage in having additional formal analysis of the system along the lines suggested in the interim report of the Commission on Electronic Voting.
In addition, a senior Department of Finance official told the committee that the Department was concerned that it did not have full details of the likely savings from the system when it approved a €33 million procurement process in October 2002.
Mr Jimmy Doyle, an assistant secretary in the public expenditure division, said the Department would have preferred projections about the extent of the likely savings going forward.
He also said the Department had "general concerns" to ensure the security and reliability of the system when an initial process was initiated in June 2000.
