In a "virtual presidential election" conducted by The Irish Times on the Web and confined to Irish citizens living outside of the State, Prof Mary McAleese has emerged as the "virtual President" with a victory on the third count over Ms Mary Banotti.
The final result, however, could not be declared before The Irish Times computer system had eliminated some major efforts at "virtual electoral fraud".
Almost a quarter of more than 1,000 votes cast were from people resident in the Republic attempting to convince the computer that they lived outside the State. State-of-the-art technology ensured, however, that attempts to confuse the computer failed miserably.
One voter in Limerick, for example, thought that voting 11 times for Mary Banotti in the space of 60 seconds would not be found out. His attempt to "vote early and often" and those of another virtual voter in the UK to vote 10 times for Adi Roche were immediately picked up by the built-in detection programme.
One-third of all illegal votes came from the UK, including Northern Ireland, for Ms Banotti, and these were made up entirely of attempts to cast multiple votes for the Fine Gael candidate. Another one-third of the illegal votes, mostly from the Republic, were cast for Ms Adi Roche. The final one-third of illegal votes were given in equal proportions for Prof McAleese, Mr Derek Nally and Dana Rosemary Scallon.
All those who voted early and often and all those who detected voting from within the Republic of Ireland were removed from the virtual poll and sent immediately, so to speak, to a place of punishment called Cyberia.
The would-be fraudsters having been eliminated, Prof McAleese received 45.1 per cent of the first preferences against 36.6 per cent for Ms Banotti, figures which were very close to those produced by the latest MRBI opinion polls. Among the other candidates, however, Ms Adi Roche received 11.8 per cent, considerably more than those forecast for the election in Ireland, while Ms Scallon on 4 per cent and Mr Nally on 2.5 per cent fared worse than the opinion polls have suggested.
Voters from all over the world participated in The Irish Times on the Web poll. Irish people from the United States accounted for 40 per cent of the poll with 20 per cent of votes coming for the UK, including Northern Ireland. Thirty per cent of votes were from mainland Europe. These included votes from all the EU countries and participants from Russia, Estonia and Poland. The remaining 10 per cent came from the rest of the world but preponderantly from Australia and New Zealand.