The Government is to phase in an electronic voting system that will remove the need for monitoring the electoral process in the traditional way.
The new system will also mean the end of marathon vote counts by hand. At the last general election in 1997 it took more than a week to decide the result in Dublin South East.
The Environment Minister, Mr Dempsey, said one of the reasons for the change was the steadily decreasing turnout of voters in recent years, which had focused attention on democracy and the importance of the right to vote.
He added: "The proposed electronic voting and counting project is an investment in this most fundamental of rights."
Future ballot papers will feature pictures of candidates beside their party emblems, where applicable, and voters will press a button to make their choices under the proportional representation electoral system.
Mr Dempsey said disks recording the votes would be sent to a central counting centre after the polls closed and "within an hour or so we will get a result from the constituency involved".
At present, counting does not begin until the day after elections and takes an average of about 12 hours to complete nationwide.
The machines to be used, provided by a Dutch company, will be tested over the next six months and could be used for the first time in a by-election or in a selected number of constituencies at the next general election.
"Once we are satisfied the devices work, we will use them nationally for the first time at local elections due in 2004," said Mr Dempsey.
He conceded that some of the excitement of long counts was bound to be sacrificed by the switch to a fully automatic system - and that the tallymen would be out of work.
The Minister said: "We will be getting more accurate tallies than we had before, with printouts of votes immediately available.
"For a country that wants to put across an image of itself as being a good place to do e-business, with good information technology infrastructure, this will add to that image," Mr Dempsey said.