The Government has come under renewed pressure to abandon the €52 million electronic voting system following a highly-critical report from the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC), writes Liam Reid, Political Reporter
The committee chairman, Michael Noonan of Fine Gael, said at the report's launch that electronic voting was now "a dead duck". He said a majority of TDs on the committee, including three members of Fianna Fáil, believed the current system should be scrapped.
The PAC report comes a few days after the Progressive Democrats passed a motion at their annual conference calling for electronic voting to be abandoned in favour of the traditional paper ballot.
The Irish Times has learned that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Tánaiste Mary Harney met recently to discuss the issue. Last night, however, the Government insisted that no decision had yet been made on the future of the electronic system. Minister for the Environment Dick Roche said the Government would be making a decision in the coming months once it received a report from the Commission on Electronic Voting (CEV), which has been asked to advise the Government on the issue. He said nobody could prejudge any decision on the system's future until this report had been forwarded to the Government. However, he ruled out the use of the system in the next general election.
Last night a spokesman for Ms Harney insisted that electronic voting "is not an issue that divides Fianna Fáil and the PDs". He said the matter would be discussed by the Government after it received the CEV report, and that the "views of many groups and parties, including the PDs, will be closely considered".
Many TDs believe that the 7,000 voting machines which are in storage around the country at an annual cost of €700,000 will never be used. They believe the machines will be out of date in terms of design and technology before any opportunity arises to use them.
Fianna Fáil member of the PAC Sean Fleming told The Irish Times that he believed cross-party support was needed if electronic voting was to be implemented, and he did not see this happening in relation to the current system. "I'm personally in favour of electronic voting but looking at the practicalities, they won't be used in the next general election and they will be 10 years old by the time of the general election after that, and who could trust them at that stage after being in storage for nearly a decade?"
Mr Roche insisted that the report of the CEV could not be prejudged. "The report will require a period during which we'll study it, and the system is not going to be in place in 2007, but it is not logical to jump forward and say it can never be used."
The PAC cast doubt on several aspects of the project, and questioned whether it would have led to the financial savings originally predicted by the Government. The system was due to be used during the 2004 local and European elections, but this was abandoned when the CEV reported that there had been insufficient testing of the system. Yesterday's report by the PAC found that the cost-benefit analysis had not been done "as rigorously as it should have been", and that there was doubt about the claims that it would save €1 million at each election until 2020. It also criticised the fact that the storage and insurance arrangements were "characterised by ad hoc arrangements leading to unacceptable variations in costs".
The report said that the value for money of the programme could only be deduced when a decision on whether the machines would ever be used was made.