Mr. Art O'Leary:

In terms of developments in technology across the world, we are looking at what people do in other countries in order to make it easy for people to vote. We dipped our toe into this area last year when we made it much easier for people to register to vote. It takes two minutes and 57 seconds to register to vote. The point we were making in the hundreds of media interviews that we did was that while people were waiting for their kettle to boil for their cup of coffee in the morning, they could register to vote. In that one-year period, we ran three campaigns in advance of all of the electoral events and 500,000 new people joined the register on the basis of those campaigns and the fact that it was so easy to register. We could not convert those 500,000 new registrants into people who actually voted for the first time because it is hard to vote. You have to go to a particular place, on a particular day, during particular hours, and if you cannot do even one of those three things, then you are off the team and cannot vote.

We are exploring a number of options, as part of our research, which will use technology to make it much easier for people to vote. This is not just about the act of voting itself but also the way that we provide information to people in advance. One of the big reasons that people gave for not voting in the last election was that they did not know for whom to vote. We have to make it easier. We need to be showing people ballot papers in advance so that they can do their research. In order to do this properly, there is a bit of drudgery to be done. People have to look up the candidates and what they stand for and so on. There was an initiative being run out of the University of Limerick, for example, under Dr. Rory Costello, called WhichCandidate.ie. People can put in their constituency and the issues in which they are interested and it gives them a suggested candidate. It has been peer reviewed. I do wonder about things like that but many people use it. The Irish Independent did something similar in an initiative involving Professor David Farrell. It is not just about voting on the day but about everything up to that as well.

Increasingly, I hear from my electoral management body colleagues that electoral commissions all over the world are becoming less about monitoring and managing elections and more about all of the work that happens between electoral events, including education, the electoral register and research. All of these things are the heavy lifting, the work that gets done in between electoral events. It is no longer just simply about polling day and the count centres. To my mind, we should be called the democracy commission.