Madam, - The ultimate test of any voting system is whether it has the respect and trust of the electorate. Regardless of how many "experts" are consulted and how much money is thrown at what's left of the electronic voting project, its sorry track record means it will never be trusted by the public.
What the remaining proponents of electronic voting still fail to understand is that existing manual voting systems are the product of hundreds of years of trial and error and that many of the perceived inefficiencies have a practical purpose.
The huge number of people involved in an election count means that any successful conspiracy to pervert an election must involve dozens of individuals who are willing to break the law in full view of suspicious observers. The count is laboriously carried out by human beings who, unlike computers, understand what their job is and cannot be arbitrarily reprogrammed to misbehave.
Instead of trying to spend its way out of the problem the Government needs to take a deep breath and consider what kind of legacy it wishes to leave future generations of voters. A decision to scrap the system would no doubt attract derision in the short term but it would be the right thing to do.
Ireland should wait until another country with a similar electoral system develops a reliable electronic voting system and has had several non-suspicious changes of government before even considering electronic voting again. - Yours, etc,
DAVID ROLFE, Leinster Road, Rathmines, Dublin 6.