Dr. Liam Weeks:

The consultation paper has posed a considerable number of questions, some of which are secondary matters and cannot be answered in this statement. For example, issues concerning the cost of an electoral commission depend on the remit afforded to such a body. I am not in a position to answer all these questions, as issues such as the independence of the commission and how it is to be established are matters for powers higher than my own to decide. What I would like to discuss, however, are the functions that would be afforded to such a commission. For me, this is the key question.

Other experts have made presentations to the committee in recent weeks and have addressed a number of areas the commission could tackle. I will focus on one, the area of research and education. By research, I do not mean anodyne academic papers that no one reads but, rather, a monitoring of the system, whether it is fit for purpose, international best practice and so on.

The current process is an Irish solution that creates an Irish problem. I have observed elections in a number of countries, including transition democracies and the likes of Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, and noted that one of the first steps taken on the road to democracy is to adopt an electoral commission. Therefore, we in Ireland seem to be rather slow on the uptake.

The primary reason Ireland needs an electoral commission is to carry out research into the electoral process and to educate voters and the rest of the population about it. A commission is required to monitor the operation of the electoral process, which does not happen at present. Systems and processes evolve in other walks of life but in the area of elections they seem to stand still. For example, in the area of personal banking, there has been a movement from being able to withdraw money from the local branch only to being able to withdraw from any branch, and then there was a movement to ATMs and recently to online banking. Why is there no organisation monitoring the practice of elections in Ireland that could oversee a similar evolution?

We are using pretty much the same system for the past 100 years, with very little review of the process. For example, we must register at a police station, we must vote at a local school, we must still use pen and paper, and we are still using limited constituency sizes of three, four and five seats when it is known that proportional representation can be achieved only with constituencies of five seats or more. There is no reason we cannot have larger constituencies given the small size of Ireland. The recent European Parliament elections are an example. South Australia, with a territory eleven times larger than the island of Ireland, uses the same electoral system as we do and yet treats the state as a single constituency for elections to the federal Senate. Other areas in which the electoral rules have not evolved include the use of an inequitable arbitrary means of distributing surplus votes and the alphabetical listing of candidates on the ballot paper.

Tasmania, for example, uses Robson rotation. New Zealand uses the Meek method. Australia and Scotland use the WIG method. Are voters aware of all these methods? Are the administrators aware of them? Why is there no consideration of them or research into them? Australia is a fine example to mention. It uses the same electoral system as Ireland for federal, state, territorial and local government elections. It produces regular reports on the operation of the system and how it could be improved. Conferences are held regularly to discuss various aspects of the electoral process, from voter registration and lowering the minimum age to vote to the design of the ballot paper.

In Ireland, there has been a lot of talk recently about reform of the electoral system but its being specified in the Constitution is being used as an excuse to prevent change. However, there are a lot of aspects to the voting system that could be altered by simple legislation without the need for a referendum.

This has happened in Australia where the single transferable vote system was transformed into a de factoparty list system, even though it is still STV in name. This came about following representations by, among other groups, the federal electoral commission. I am not advocating such changes, but this is an example of the role such a body could take in Ireland to investigate such matters.

There is a vast range of areas that the proposed commission could look into and which I would be happy to discuss further, but the final issue to mention is voter education. Voters in Ireland are not told how to vote or how the electoral system operates. Do voters know the value of a third, fourth or fifth preference, or the value of casting preferences full stop? This is important because we know that the large volume of non-transferable votes, which was estimated by Seán Donnelly to be about 12% at the last election, can have an impact on the final outcome.

There could be voter education programs for the large non-Irish population entitled to vote at local and - for EU citizens - European Parliament elections. Similar programmes could take place for British citizens who can vote at Dáil elections. Likewise for the Travelling community - do we even know what proportion of the non-Irish and Travelling community vote at elections in Ireland?

Symptomatic of the failings of the current system is the severe lack of online public information about elections and election results in Ireland. Brief summaries are available on the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government's website for the last set of Dáil and local elections, but that is the limited extent of this coverage. Compared to that available for other countries, it is woefully inadequate. Ireland urgently needs an electoral commission.