Dr. Theresa Reidy:

There are different approaches to auditing electoral events around the world. When we talk about the electoral cycle, we are often talking about a 12-stage electoral cycle - everything from voter registration to party registration to voter information to the campaign period itself to polling day. There is often an appeals process or the potential for an appeals process afterwards. We are talking about what is sometimes called an election ecosystem when we talk about auditing it. One would really want to ensure that one had capacity to evaluate each of these stages - perhaps not all in the one go, although there are processes for undertaking what is called a full electoral audit.

There are different systems in place. If the Senator is particularly interested in this, we have a UK-based colleague, Professor Toby James, who works quite a lot on this area. He has developed a number of systems, on which he has written a number of books, and these have been adapted and taken on board by electoral commissions around the world. He would certainly be a good person to contact to get more detail on how it is done.

The election work we do much of the time relates to understanding how people voted, why they voted and what information they found useful, with the intention of feeding that back into the system. Our work tends to be more post-election evaluation.

Work done specifically on Ireland that is worth mentioning includes work done by the Electoral Integrity Project, which is based out of Harvard University and Sydney University. It does an expert evaluation of the electoral process after elections. Ireland was included in that in 2011 and 2016. The evaluation includes everything, for example, party finance regulation and evaluation of the electoral registers. That project is interesting because it involves experts evaluating how they think the election worked, rather than having an audit team going into the commission and evaluating the documents. It is an expert evaluation.

There are a number of different ways in which this can be done. One probably wants to have the flexibility to allow different models. Some of this work can also be done external to the electoral commissions. There are international research projects, for example, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, involved in this kind of work. In the case of Ireland, there is potential to engage more effectively with some of these international projects and also to ensure that capacity is built into the electoral commission so that it can do some of this work as well. Some of this international work is being done but Ireland is not often included in these studies because we have a decentralised model and we do not have budgets. For example, our elections were covered by the Electoral Integrity Project in 2011 and 2016 but not in 2020.