Mr. Art O'Leary:

We are going to look at the ballot paper issues and ballot paper design issues. Mr. Ryan knows because they had a look at a two-column paper in the Chair's constituency many years ago. The difficulty is that there were spoiled votes where people voted one, two, three in the first column and one, two, three in the second column. That was the opposite problem to the one in the European Parliament elections.

Again, that can be solved by education too. There were problems with the length of the ballot paper, including with tearing them along the perforated line. Our data suggest that some of the difficulties people had arose from the length of the ballot paper, not knowing who to vote for and all those issues. There were also privacy issues in the booths. The new booths are probably not big enough to cater for a ballot paper long enough to accommodate 28 people. It is like a sheet of toilet roll. This is an issue to bear in mind.

I do not want to be the person who puts this on the table but I will say it anyway. There are some solutions here. One is to make it harder to get on the ballot paper, which I do not think anyone has an appetite for. Alternatively, we could do electronic voting or electronic counting or else double or treble the number of people doing the counting. If we are already finding it difficult to get the number of counters we have now, this option is probably not a viable practical solution. I am not sure there is any appetite for electronic voting or electronic counting either.

The other country in the world that uses PR-STV the way we do is Malta, as the committee will know. That country has just introduced electronic counting and claims it is even more transparent because a photograph is taken of every ballot paper. This means everybody can see every ballot paper if they so wish as well. I am having a look at that option. I spoke to the company that installed this system for the Maltese authorities. It is not something for today or tomorrow, but perhaps down the line, if this issue persists as a problem and no viable solution emerges from a ballot paper design perspective, then it is something we might have a look at.