Dr. Jane Suiter:

I can see Dr. Reidy now. I will address the questions on disinformation and perhaps Dr. Reidy can speak about postal voting and flexibility. In a way, they both speak to the same thing, which is our overarching concern that this is a pretty prescribed piece of proposed legislation that does not allow much flexibility, yet we know that in the ten or 20 years that committee members have been involved in politics there have been huge changes in campaigning, the information environment and everything else. Therefore, it would seem necessary that some sort of flexibility for functions would be built into the legislation.

Specifically relating to disinformation, there simply is not the flexibility for the commission to deal appropriately with that and this would need to be considered. Some electoral commissions deal with fact-checking.

Our Referendum Commission has done some work in this area but again it is limited and more could be done in that regard. We do not want to get into contested political areas but there are some claims that are manifestly false and not factually based. That is important and not just in referendums. The text from the Referendum Commission has been copied but it has not then been addressed to election periods. It does not apply outside election periods. There is a tightly defined political area but we all know there are issues with influencers and bots, for example, and there are many ways in which this can happen. The flexibility just is not there for this commission to deal with that kind of matter.