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Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Wednesday, 8 Mar 1972

Vol. 259 No. 8

Committee on Finance. - Electoral (Amendment) Bill, 1971: Committee Stage.

SECTION 1.

I suggest amendments Nos. 1 and 2 can be discussed together.

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 2, between lines 10 and 11, to insert the following subsection:

"() the deletion of `embossed or' from Rule 3 (2) of the Fourth Schedule, as amended by section 29 of the Electoral Act, 1963;".

This amendment is tabled to ensure that in future the marking of ballot papers will be done by some type of perforation rather than by the present system of embossing. In the original Acts the choice was left open as to whether ballot papers would be embossed or perforated. What has happened in practice is that ballot papers are usually embossed. We have all seen the machines in polling stations by means of which the presiding officer stamps the ballot paper and hands it out. Subsequently we have all had experience of the confrontations and arguments that take place at the count as to whether or not a ballot paper is valid. I have seen assessors with glasses trying to decipher the marking and decide whether it is an accidental marking or a proper stamp. It would be better to decide on some uniform system of marking to ensure beyond yea or nay the validity of every ballot paper.

I have here a ballot paper which was rejected. Up here at the top there is an attempt at embossing. The assessor decided that this ballot paper was invalid. It was cast in County Monaghan and it was cast for Fine Gael—1, 2 and 3—but it was rejected on the basis that the mark was not adequate. Hundreds of ballot papers up and down the country with that type of mark have been rejected. It is to avoid that in future that I suggest in this amendment that we should cease having an optional arrangement, perforation or embossing, and have a uniform system less open to question because, towards the end of the day, the presiding officer gets tired, there is a rush of voters and he sticks these ballot papers into the machine and gives the machine a gentle tap and passes them out. The embossing is hardly marked at all. This is how the difficulty arises. It should be possible to devise a perforating marker which would establish beyond yea or nay that the paper was properly stamped and, therefore, valid.

I agree with Deputy Hogan in this. We have all seen people looking at these ballot papers, holding them up against the light and feeling them with the tips of their fingers to find out whether or not the stamp has been applied. It is bad enough at the counts, with the confrontations and the show of force, but all this is done in a special section and the act is put on for hours on end at times.

I understand the thinking of Deputies in this matter. There have been a few cases in which it was difficult to determine whether or not the official stamp was on the ballot paper and whether or not it was a valid vote. However, in dealing with the amendment we must put it clearly on the record that as the law stands the official mark may be either by embossing or by perforation and the practice has been to emboss. The hand-operated machines for carrying out this embossing are available and have been in use. Indeed, after some complaints that were made at the last election I issued instructions to returning officers to check on those stamping instruments and to replace those that were deemed to have been worn and were not making the marks clearly. It might be a good idea to use the perforating system but if I were to accept the amendment as the Deputy has put it down perforating the ballot paper would be the only lawful system. If we were to pass it in this Bill we would be obliged to have perforation instruments available at the next poll which one may reasonably expect to be on the occasion of the referendum, possibly some time in April or May. I want to tell the Deputy in the best faith that it would not be possible to acquire these instruments in time to have them available for a poll at that time.

The best estimate I have got has led me to believe that it would take about 12 months if we were to decide to do this. We would be placing ourselves in a rather dangerous position if I were to accept the amendment now. However, I will make this suggestion to the Deputy. As the law stands embossing or perforation may be used. We have operated the embossing and it has been fairly successful. We have not operated the perforating system so we do not even know whether this system would be successful or not. In other words, it has not been tried out and we might be groping in the dark with it and taking a chance. If we were to accept the amendment I think we would be taking a very grave risk and subsequently it might be found by all that the perforating system was not desirable or successful, or as good as the embossing system. I would suggest to the Deputy that maybe at some future election I could try out, as an experiment, in one constituency, the use of the perforating method of marking the ballot paper. As the law stands, we can use either but it would take some time. There is only one of these machines available to me for election purposes at the moment and I have some idea of the type of instrument we require but to acquire sufficient to cover the country would take 12 months and perhaps longer. I think it might be a good idea to experiment in one constituency at some future election and then let a decision be made as to whether or not all elections should be done under this system afterwards and if so acquire a sufficient amount of instruments to operate that system.

I could not accept the amendment. It would place us in an impossible position. However, perhaps the Deputy would consider withdrawing the amendment and accept in good faith that I will consider carrying out an experiment at some future election in one constituency on the perforation system and see how it works.

In view of what the Minister has said, that it would take him 12 months to get a system of perforators to carry out this and as we are facing a referendum, he has certainly made a case. I could not, therefore, push this amendment and I withdraw it.

Before it is withdrawn would the Minister not agree that since the object of the amendment is to ensure that ballot papers are correctly marked and can be seen to be marked, surely the obvious thing to have done was to have issued instructions that a presiding officer who did not properly mark all ballot papers in election boxes at one election should not be employed again? We would then have no mistakes. The reason for mistakes was that people were so careless that in the evening they got five, six or a dozen of ballot papers, pushed them in together and then had not got the energy to push the lever down hard enough to make a mark. It would have been a simple solution. I do not accept the Minister's suggestion that it would be 12 months before the replacements could be got but I fear the cost would probably add another £10,000 or £12,000 to the £130,000 which the local elections will cost.

I agree with Deputy Tully that the presiding officer has a vital part to play in ensuring that each ballot paper is properly stamped. Where reports have come to me that some presiding officers did not stamp I have given instructions that these people should not be re-employed at future elections. There is a booklet of instructions for presiding officers and great emphasis is placed on their responsibility to ensure that each ballot paper is stamped properly and clearly.

Will the Minister assure the House that he will once more get after the returning officers about these old defective machines? Has he any information as to whether they all got rid of them?

Yes, the Stationery Office are responsible for these and those that had defective dies have all been replaced.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Amendment No. 2 not moved.

Amendments Nos. 3, 5, 8, 10 and 12 are cognate and Nos. 4, 6, 9, 11 and 13 in the name of Deputy O'Donovan comprise an alternative proposition so it is suggested that these amendments be taken together.

I move amendment No. 3:

In subsection (j), page 3, to delete "Counterfoil No.........." and "No.........." from form of ballot paper.

These amendments deal with the numbering on the back of the voting paper and the numbering on the counterfoil. The same numbers go on both. I suggest that both should be removed. In my view no number is required on the back of the voting paper particularly if validity is clearly established by proper stamping. Neither do I see the necessity for having a number on the counterfoil, although I concede that it might be helpful to the presiding officer to see how many votes he has issued. I do not know how many voting papers are in each book but if there was a standard number he could easily count the number of books at the end of the day and he would only have to count at most 50 or 100 of the incompleted book. I do not think there is a great necessity to have the number on the counterfoil, although I have not got a terrible objection to that.

This question arose out of a High Court action in which it was decided that the secrecy of the ballot was interfered with by entering into the ballot paper the number and the lettering on the register of electors of a particular voter and thereafter it was possible to trace how that voter voted. If we still retain the number on the back of the voting paper and on the counterfoil it will still be possible to trace how a person voted simply by observing the sequence in which the voting papers are given out. It is questionable, if these amendments are not accepted and if the number is still on the back of the ballot paper and on the counterfoil, whether we may not be open to a second High Court procedure and find that we are still conducting our elections in an unconstitutional manner. The Minister, with the advice of the Attorney General, cannot tell us that it is constitutional or it is not. It is only unconstitutional when the High Court says it is unconstitutional. All we can do here, whether we are lawyers or lay people, is express an opinion. The Minister is taking a risk in leaving it as open as that. Admittedly, the question of the numbering on the back of the ballot paper and numbering on the counterfoil were not put as issues to the High Court judge when the matter was on appeal.

They were.

No decision on them was expressed.

Yes, there was. The court did not deem them unconstitutional.

I may have read the Minister's brief incorrectly. Was the court specifically asked about them?

Apart from the constitutionality aspect, there is still another side to it. In all the electoral legislation ever passed in this House, there was always the little piece stuck in, and it is here in this Bill also, in reference to presidential elections, to a constitutional referendum and all referenda, and I presume it will still be considered necessary in respect of all ballot papers. It is to the effect that the back of each ballot paper shall be numbered consecutively and the front and the counterfoil attached to it shall bear the same number. It indicates that the number on the back of the ballot paper shall be printed in the smallest characters compatible with legibility. There is something slick in that. I do not quite understand it. Apparently, no legislation ever arose from this particular matter. The writing must be as small as possible, presumably so that nobody could read it from the opposite side of a table. If any legal problem had to be resolved the writing could be read with a microscope. I show here the number on the back of a ballot paper and it is supposed to be so small as to be barely legible. One could nearly read this paper from the far side of the House.

One would need to have the Deputy's glasses to read it.

There is another entry on it, "the election for the constituency of Monaghan". Not alone is the number on it, but the name of the constituency is also written in. Does that conform with the legislation which we have in this country?

This is not the smallest writing that could be legible and that is what is written into the Bill. I do not understand why. I have seen other voting papers with just a small number on them. I do not see why this particular one should be different. I do not know how many other voting papers may be printed in a similar manner. This is a voting paper dealing with an election in which Deputy Erskine Childers was elected. Is he a proper Member of the House?

Obviously that vote did not help to elect him.

We will not inquire where that came from.

I should imagine there has not been an exhibit like this before. That is all I have to say about this. There is no necessity for a long dissertation on a matter of this nature. The amendment is quite clear. I am not particularly worried about the number being retained on the counterfoil. Deputy O'Donovan has other amendments in which he deals with taking the number off the back of the ballot paper only. The removal of the name from the back of the voting paper is the crucial point. If that is done we will have established absolutely and preserved the secrecy of the ballot. Until we do that, we have not established as absolutely as is desirable the complete secrecy of the ballot. I ask the Minister to consider the amendment. Deputy O'Donovan will speak after me and he will ask the Minister to consider some other amendments also.

It will be appreciated by the House that Deputy Hogan and myself have worked independently on this problem. The reason why I suggest that the number might be retained on the back of the counterfoil was referred to by Deputy Hogan. My recollection of elections is that a certificate has to be issued by the presiding officer as to the number of ballots in the box. My whole purpose was to ensure that at the end of the day, when they had the counterfoils, the presiding officer would not have any great difficulty in making out his certificate. Unless there was a number on the back of the counterfoil, there could be difficulty. Often not just one block is used, but sometimes one sees two or three different blocks being used at the one table. The whole purpose of my amendments is to retain the number on the back of the counterfoil. This is to ensure that life would be made easy for the presiding officer at the end of a 12-hour day. Like Deputy Hogan I am not wedded to this, provided it is taken off the back of the ballot paper. I want to refer to a matter to which Deputy Hogan referred and that is the very fact that in the action these words were put in:

The number on the back of the ballot paper shall be printed in the smallest characters compatible with legibility.

It is quite obvious that the reason why that was put in was because there were grave doubts in the Minister's mind, and in the minds of his advisers, as to how to deal with the matter properly. They thought up this method. It would be far better not to have this kind of thing at all. The last day the Parliamentary Secretary talked about stuffing the ballot boxes with paper. If the presiding officer is a responsible person —and the Minister has assured us that if a presiding officer is found irresponsible he is let leave—this difficulty would not arise. Suppose that some ballots did get into the ballot box without being properly dealt with, if they had not been stamped they would not count. I do not see how they could get in, but if the number of papers in the ballot box did not correspond with the certificate of the presiding officer there would be a variety of ways of doing it. If it is a minor discrepancy, say four, five or ten, they could be chosen by lot. If, in fact, there were twice as many ballot papers in the box as there should be, the whole box should be scrapped. If that happened at the moment I take it the whole box would be thrown out. I do not think there is any other method of dealing with it.

I have explained why I put down this amendment and why I have no objection to having the number on the counterfoil. It is true, as the Minister said, that the High Court did not hold this to be unconstitutional. The High Court had a more important matter to decide. The primary thing put to it by the plaintiff in the action was that your registration number was written on the counterfoil. This was the basis on which the case was decided. The judge made an obiter dictum. He said: “We find that all right.” It was not the case that was put to him. The case that was put to him was that the voter's registration number was written on the counterfoil and that you could track it quite easily by comparing the two. Deputy Hogan and myself are really in agreement on this and, perhaps, we could hear from the Minister.

Deputy Hogan made an interesting comment when he said that neither the Minister nor the Attorney General would decide whether a matter was constitutional or not. I accept that this is a matter which we allow our courts to decide. In the case I mentioned numbering the back of ballot papers and the counterfoils came before the courts.

The courts were asked to declare unconstitutional Direction No. 5 in Part II of the Second Schedule to the Electoral Act, 1963, which reads as follows:

The back of each ballot paper shall be numbered consecutively and the front of the counterfoil attached to it shall bear the same number. The number on the back of the ballot paper shall be printed in the smallest characters compatible with legibility.

The court did not decide to do so and it can be taken from that that the provision has been given a clear bill of health from the constitutional viewpoint. We are now being asked to remove the serial number on the ground that it endangers the secrecy of the ballot despite the judgment of the Supreme Court, which Deputy Hogan accepts is the final arbiter in this matter.

That decision is good enough for me and I stand over it. That disposes of the main point Deputy Hogan made, that we may be faced at some future date with a court case in relation to whether or not this matter is constitutional. It has already been decided by the court. I do not want to talk too long on this because I cannot accept this at all.

During the course of the Second Reading a number of Deputies said it was possible by reference to the serial numbers on the ballot papers to discover how particular electors voted. I want to refute this completely. It was suggested by Deputies who spoke on it that it could be done by personation agents managing to ascertain and to note the number of an elector's ballot paper on the polling day and then at the count looking out for the marked ballot paper bearing the serial number concerned. In fact, it is not possible to do this.

Rule 32 of the Fifth Schedule to the Electoral Act, 1923, as amended by the Electoral Act, 1963, specifically provides that a returning officer must, while counting and recording the number of ballot papers, keep the ballot papers with their faces upwards and must take all proper precautions for preventing any person from seeing the numbers printed on the back of such papers. Any person who communicates any of this information is committing an offence for which there are certain fines laid down.

They are counted face downwards.

I have read out the law in relation to this. They are obliged to put them down face upwards.

I am telling the Minister what happens.

If the returning officer is not carrying out his functions that, of course, is another matter. There are a number of important functions that this number fulfils and I will list some of them. It is essential, first of all, to distinguish with some certainty one ballot paper from another. The necessity to do this could arise where the returning officer's ruling on the validity of a particular paper is being questioned. For example, if somebody brought an election petition to the courts on the basis that certain ballot papers ought to have been rejected at the count it would be necessary in a case like that to be able to identify with certainty the particular ballot paper concerned. This could only be done by way of numbering the back of the ballot paper.

It is also a very great safeguard against fraudulent ballot papers being used. Of course, it facilitates the returning officer in recording the number of ballot papers issued to a presiding officer. I do not think the House has objected to it being recorded on the counterfoil. I do not know whether Deputy Hogan wants to press that.

The House can appreciate from what I have said in view of the fact that the courts were asked to pronounce it to be unconstitutional and did not do so that it is necessary in my view to retain numbering on the ballot papers in order to distinguish one from the other. This question of the smallest characters compatible with legibility is a reasonable requirement. Obviously, if the lettering on the back of the ballot paper which no person is entitled to know under the law—the law provides for that—is printed in very heavy black type on the ballot paper there would be a very good possibility that it could be read through the paper if one came down very heavily on it. This provision that it be printed in small lettering is reasonable. Deputy Hogan says that the numbers on the ballot paper he has with him are not as small as to be compatible with legibility. Of course, this is a relative thing but there is a technical difficulty here in that the availability of a numbering machine to print those numbers and the size of the machines available in the country are factors which determined the actual size. It is small, although not tiny, and it complies with the spirit of that section of the regulations. I do not think anybody would quibble with it. I would ask the Deputies not to press the two amendments.

It is obvious from what has been said that the possibility of preventing how a man voted being known depends on the returning officer carrying out the instructions which the Minister has just given. As every Deputy knows, this, in fact, is not done in the polling booth. The bundles are turned upside down so that, in fact, whereas the regulation may provide some safeguard, the practice does not. Therefore, I contend that in practice at the moment a ballot paper can be traced. This amendment will go the whole way towards marrying the practice and the rule in this case and it is absolutely essential that it be accepted.

On a point of information, I should like to ask the Minister a couple of questions. How is the system of voting carried out in Britain? Do they, too, have a number on the back of the ballot paper with a corresponding number on the front of the counterfoil? How does the Minister find it necessary to retain these numbers and how can he reconcile this with the system of voting which obtains, for example, in the United States, which I understand nobody objects to and which is regarded as secret voting? There is no provision for this tremendous crosscheck because the voting is not recorded, as far as I know, by any system with numbers on the back of the voting paper and numbers on the counterfoil. You pull a lever on a voting machine, and apparently it is regarded as satisfactory.

As regards the question whether it is necessary to retain the numbers on the back of the voting paper and on the front of the counterfoil in order to prevent the production of fraudulent papers, the presence of the numbers on the back will not prevent an ingenious group of local politicians who have contact with the printing house and who can get the necessary co-operation from having a few duplicates printed in the morning and passing them in to the polling booth.

The Minister mentioned that the difficulty of having these numbers as small as is consistent with legibility on the back of the voting paper was that they did not have the machines to do the small printing. That may be so, because the printing on this is the same size as the candidates names and the political parties to which they are attached, big black print out in front and the same on the back. That can be read 20 feet away.

It strikes me that the more you hear this problem discussed the more you feel you are depending on the people who are conducting the election, the presiding officer and his assistant. To my mind, the presiding officer who would deliberately turn up the numbers on the ballot papers so that they would be available to someone or other is the same type of person as Deputy Hogan has mentioned who would be capable of going into the printers or indicating in one way or another to an election agent that a particular person was using a particular ballot paper. This human factor will exist while we have this system of voting, and I do not think there is any answer to it except the honesty and the integrity of the people who are appointed to conduct the elections. We hear some frightening and funny stories of happenings in the past. Those events are becoming less frequent and as time goes on the abuse of the ballot box will diminish even further. Everyone is more conscious of it and is exercising more care.

As the Minister has pointed out, if something goes wrong there is no real check unless you have the absolute identity of the ballot papers and this can only be achieved by numbers. Therefore the Opposition Deputies, in trying to eradicate one abuse, may be creating another.

It may have been a slip on the part of Deputy Dr. Gibbons, but we were referring to two different things. I understand it was the counting the Minister was referring to when he spoke about the ballots being counted face upwards. You may take it that when they are first sorted they are always counted face downwards and put into packets of 100. They are always counted face downwards.

That is not so.

Of course, it is so.

The Deputy may be speaking from examples he knows but we can quote other examples.

I appeal to Deputy Burke who is from the Dublin area, as I am.

I have seen them also.

The Parliamentary Secretary can say what he likes, but I am talking about what I have observed.

And I am talking about what I have observed.

What I am saying destroys the case the Minister has made. Of course, he has a legal point. It is quite true it is illegal, but do not forget that it is not the returning officer who does the counting; it is the individual counters and there are about 50 of them in a room; there is not a snowball's chance in hell of the returning officer going around and talking to them, with people leaning over the forms and all the rest of it. You would imagine this counting of votes after an election was a legal business instead of being a decided confrontation, as everybody knows it is.

I admit straight away that I did not look up the Electoral Act of 1933, but as regards this provision: "The number on the back of the ballot paper shall be printed in the smallest characters compatible with legibility," of course Deputy Hogan is dead right: the numbers are enormous; they could nearly be read across the House. If that is the way the law is being implemented this has no significance at all.

The numbers are not enormous.

They are enormous.

They cannot be read across the House either.

The Deputy should not allow his imagination to run away with him.

They can be read by the people who are present at the count and who want to track a vote or a number of votes. When there is a number on the back of the ballot paper whether it is 101, 102 or whatever it may be, there is no use in pretending that the personation agents cannot quite easily see and do see——

It is not No. 1.

What does it matter? They are consecutive numbers in the books of 100.

Each 100 does not start with 1.

It does not matter what it starts with so long as somebody can see that they are consecutive and say: "John O'Donovan came in seventh and I am suspicious of that so-and-so. He always says he votes for us but we will check out whether he did or not. It is the seventh in the series and all we have to do is watch for that. What is so particularly important about this and I am not saying whether it is justified or not——

It is not the same people who are counting the votes.

Let me finish the point I was making. I am making a direct point. It may not be true that the Fianna Fáil Party have interfered in the West of Ireland——

(Interruptions.)

What we are told is that the Fianna Fáil candidates go around and say: "We know how you vote. You may think the ballot is secret but we can track it all right."

Where does that happen?

I saw plenty in a West Limerick by-election, enough to last me the rest of my life.

That is an insult to the people of Iar-Chonnacht.

Give us an example.

I saw ballot papers in a polling booth loose on the window.

(Interruptions.)

The Parliamentary Secretary asked me for an example and I have given one. I shall not answer any more questions about it.

Did the Deputy take some of them with him? Did he tell his friends to help themselves?

Will the Parliamentary Secretary not be so smart? He asked me for an instance and I gave it to him. The fact is that genuinely there is no difficulty. I told the truth. Now, Deputy Gibbons, that was not a nice remark. I heard it. It is not true. Maybe you did not think so, but I heard it and I am entitled to comment on it. I think it was a very nasty remark. It should not have been made. Deputy Gibbons said it was a most unlikely story.

I say it openly now that it is a most unlikely story.

I do not give a damn what the Deputy says. I speak the truth. I do not care twopence.

(Interruptions.)

I did not concoct the story. Having got rid of that, let me get back to the job. It surprises me that the Government, having come so badly out of these constitutional cases continually, should still try to stick to what was only a side issue in the case that was brought to court. The case which was in the court was not referred to by the Minister. He deliberately referred to a different matter. He deliberately referred to the question of the numbers. That was not the case that was made in the court The serious part of the case that was made in the court——

It was part of the case.

I am not saying it was not part of the case, but it was not the serious part of it.

This reflects on the integrity of the judges.

I am not reflecting on their integrity.

Will the Deputy not be codding himself?

The Minister certainly tried to mislead the House. The case was decided on the basis of puting the voter's number on the counterfoil. That was the main point that was made during the case. In present day circumstances, anybody who suggests the administration is not perfect is a liar, according to Deputy Gibbons.

Now, now——

Or as near as does not matter.

——do not overstate the case.

If I had not heard the remark it would have been better. The fact is that the Government, having lost those constitutional cases, time and again are most anxious to prove that the administration is right. Administrators never make mistakes. A great thing in the Civil Service, it is said, is that whatever you do do not make a mistake because it will never be forgotten. Also it is said that the man who never made a mistake never made anything. That is quite correct and that is why the administration ticks over so slowly. It is why the Government could not get the stamps made for 12 months—rolling the old barrel along, slowly and systematically. Let us be straight about it. I was shocked when I heard the Minister talk the way he did about this matter. When he was talking at first on the earlier amendments, I thought he would see reason in these amendments in relation to the matter at issue. Mind you, he will have to listen to an awful lot of talk in the House on this matter if he does not see reason.

I should like to refer to what the Minister said about the sentence which goes back to the original 1923 Act stating that the number shall be printed in the smallest characters compatible with legibility. The Minister gave the game away when he said a little later: "Of course this is a relative thing". That sentence may conceivably mean something to lawyers, but to all sorts of people it is a sentence without meaning. It has been echoing down through 50 years and it has no meaning. The Minister said it is a relative thing depending on the light and depending on the chap who is trying to read it. It is not meant to have any meaning and the reason it is not meant to have a meaning is that you can then have figures on the back of the ballot paper of the size Deputy Hogan showed us and nobody can for a moment pretend that those figures are the smallest that are compatible with legibility.

Then one can come along and ask how small is "compatible with legibility"? Nobody can answer that. It is not meant to be answerable. It is meant to be a nice fiction, it looks polite and indicates a good intention, but it is not definable. Of course the protestations of innocence from the Fianna Fáil benches are deeply impressive. The reason for this is that a loophole is left so that whether the vote can be traced or not, electors can be led to believe it can be traced. Even if it is not traceable, even if the Minister's argument is true, even if the rules are carried out, it would be possible to make the voters believe the vote was traceable, even if it were never done.

This belief is very useful intimidation of voters. It is conceivable that laws can be made and can remain on the Statute Book which are without meaning in the sense that the smallest characters compatible with legibility is a phrase without meaning. However, this does not make for good legislation. Indeed, it is a degradation of legislative purpose and it lends itself to the abuse Deputy Hogan spoke about.

There is some cogency in the counter arguments the Minister presented but to satisfy me he will have to get over this central objection, because not alone must the vote be untraceable but the voter must be satisfied that it is untraceable. As long as you have on the back of the voting paper a number of indefinable size this will not be so. We can be offered the fatuous excuse that one cannot get a printing machine to print small enough, but once you get into that situation you are in cloud cuckoo land. The objection is not just that the vote is traceable or may be traceable but that you can browbeat people into conforming to your wishes because it can be said to them, not of course by the Minister or by any Member of this House, but by less reputable people: "Well, now, we deliver for you and you deliver for us and if you do not deliver your vote for us we will know."

Progress reported; Committee to sit again.
The Dáil adjourned at 10.30 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Thursday, 9th March, 1972.
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