Madam, - Thank you for publishing Kathy Sheridan's excellent column "In paper trails we will trust" (Opinion, January 15th).
Electronic voting without a paper trail does pose a genuine threat to our democracy. Individual voters cannot trust that their votes are recorded correctly in the proposed electronic voting system, and an electoral system is only as good as the people believe it to be. When voters see a physical copy of their vote go into a ballot box, they know it will be supervised carefully by groups of people "keeping each other honest", so to speak. They know that their vote will be counted at the end of the day. We need a paper trail to keep the electronic system honest.
The paper trail being proposed by computer experts the world over (called a voter verified audit trail), and being introduced in more and more places, does not pose any danger to the anonymity of individual votes. Just as handwritten paper ballots have no traceable connection with the voter, printed ballots would contain no clues as to who cast them.
Ohio and California have decided to use only voting systems which include such a paper trail, and a bill that would require a voter verified audit trail on every voting system in the USA is gaining support. - Yours, etc.,
MARGARET McGALEY, Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-voting, Computer Science Department, NUI, Maynooth.