There is a programme on RTE radio entitled "What If". It brings together expert analysts to discuss what if different decisions had been made at key times in Irish history.
I wonder whether in years to come a "What If" programme will be made about the extension of electronic voting to the local and European elections. The "what if" in that situation would ask what if the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Cullen, had constructively engaged with the Committee on the Environment and Local Government which examined this issue last November and December. What if he had not effectively railroaded the committee into a decision endorsing his plans? What if he and his officials had engaged in an open, active and vigorous debate with Opposition parties and technical experts who have expressed reservations about their plans? If that engagement and dialogue had taken place, we might not be in the position we are in now.
We have listened to the Minister, Deputy Cullen, for weeks telling us to trust him and that everything is in order. As late as last Monday night, we heard the Taoiseach say that he had seen no hard evidence that there was a problem with the system. Now, thanks to the combined efforts of Fine Gael, the Labour Party and the Green Party and to the articulate external independent experts, some of whom are in the Visitors Gallery, who have taken this issue to the airwaves, we are slowly bringing the Government to a point where they realise that the Minister got it badly wrong last December.
I have been a member of Dáil Éireann for 23 years and, in all that time, I have only once experienced the type of arrogance displayed by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government as he tries to introduce electronic voting. I suspect that if the Minister were in the country now, he would similarly have railroaded his Cabinet colleagues into a "no surrender" policy. However, we did get a limited climbdown by the Government yesterday. However, that poses as many questions as it answers.
The insincerity of the Government in announcing an independent panel at this stage is astounding. We are told that an ad hoc committee will be set up and that a statutorily based panel will follow at a later date. There should be no ad hoc approach to the running of elections. This exercise has exemplified the ad hoc approach and been full of indecision and Government bungling. It is hypocritical of the Government to continue to roll out electronic voting and to insist on having no voter-verified paper audit trail while at the same time the independent panel is supposed to deliberate over the integrity of the system.
I do not claim to be an information technology expert but, since this issue has become topical, I have received many e-mails and phone calls from IT professionals expressing their concerns at the way in which the Government is proceeding. For example, one individual has told me that the Food and Drug Administration, FDA, in the United States will not allow the use of an Access database by firms seeking authorisation from it due to issues of verifiability and audit trail. However, the counting software being used in the Minister's system is based on Access. Why is Access not reliable enough for the FDA but good enough to count our votes?
I am not in a position to resolve all these technical questions, but we need to have them resolved. The best way of doing that is to ask an independent electoral commission to do the necessary work. There is a precedent for establishing an electoral commission. India has one and there the commissioner has the status of a Supreme Court judge. Canada established one under its 1920 Dominion Elections Act and that commissioner has the same status.
The Government's intransigence and arrogance has breached the trust between Government and voter. We are not Luddites. Fine Gael accepts the principle of electronic voting, but we insist on the best available system for casting and counting our votes. The Minister for Finance made a speech in this debate in which he used adjectives like "insidious", "unworthy", "diabolical" and "appalling". These comments were over the top. They demonstrate the thin ice on which the Government is skating with regard to electronic voting.
So far, the climbdown on electronic voting has all the hallmarks of delaying tactics by the Government until it is too late to use the paper based system. It is a cynical attempt to deflect from a flawed system. The introduction of an electronic voting system must be managed only by an independent statutorily based electoral commission and must include a verifiable paper audit trail. We must also ensure that the 41 questions posed at the Oireachtas committee on 18 December 2003 by computer experts are answered by the Minister and his officials.
Confidence in the voting system is the bedrock of democracy and anything that diminishes or damages that confidence should be avoided. Serious concerns have been raised regarding the proposed electronic voting system and I do not understand the Taoiseach's statement, to which I referred earlier, which suggests that he is ignorant of the fact that a major report submitted to the Committee on the Environment and Local Government on 18 December contained 41 questions. Those questions were passed to the Secretary General of the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government who undertook to engage with the experts to answer the questions within the briefest interval. Two months later, the questions have not been answered.
The critical all-party consensus that was promised with the introduction of legislation to cater for the change to electronic voting has been cynically dumped in favour of ramming through a system that has fundamental question marks about its transparency and accountability and which has lost the faith of all the major political parties and, most importantly, the public.
The condescending attitude manifesting itself in the advertising for electronic voting — pressing buttons — is doing damage to the credibility of the future introduction of electronic voting. The campaign has been marred by partisan leaflets and website demonstrations of voting options and will do little to aid public confidence in the concept of electronic voting, especially a system that is being presented to the public by a company over which there are major question marks concerning how it obtained the contract.
The Fine Gael leader, Deputy Kenny, asked questions about the awarding of the contract.