Dáil Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 2 Apr 2003

Vol. 564 No. 2

Written Answers - Electronic Voting.

Paul Nicholas Gogarty

Question:

226 Mr. Gogarty asked the Minister for the Environment and Local Government the general and specific measures in place to allow recovery of electronic votes from a voting machine following a hardware failure of voting machine equipment and vote storage equipment after a polling station has closed; and, if in such circumstances, a recovery of the electronic votes is not possible, the general and specific backup measures which are in place to recover votes cast to ensure that no member of the public is disenfranchised as a result. [9201/03]

Minister for the Environment and Local Government (Mr. Cullen)

A series of hardware and software measures have been taken to ensure that votes stored in a module are secure. At the close of poll, the votes in the primary ballot module in a voting machine are copied to a back-up module retained in the machine and the primary module containing the votes cast is sent, as directed by the returning officer, to the count centre. If the primary ballot module is lost or damaged en route to the count centre, the back-up module is taken from the voting machine to the count centre and used for counting the votes cast on the voting machine in question.

More than one PC is used at every count, so a second PC is always available in the event of a PC failure at the count centre. When all the votes are read into the count system and mixed prior to counting, the database containing the votes is secured. In the event of a systems failure at the count centre, the vote data in the modules can be read into the count system a second time so there is always a full copy available of the election database up to that point. The vote data is retained in the ballot modules for six months after the election, while the data in the back-up module is deleted after the count is completed.