Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

I am not conceding. Mary White will deliver a seat for the Green Party in the new East constituency very effectively.

A significant concern about this Bill is the radical change in voting systems. Most of us have sat through hours of debate on electronic voting and my initial reaction to electronic voting was "Great, let us embrace future technology." However, the more I listened to those who came before the Joint Committee on the Environment and Local Government, the more I was convinced that electronic voting, as it currently stands, is not the way forward for the election to be held this June.

The concerns raised were valid and real. If one looks at the US, those concerns have been expressed strongly in the last decade to the point where certain states, such as New Hampshire, threw out electronic voting because they wanted a paper ballot. That is the technology those states are using now.

The kernel of the argument is that we want to see a tangible paper trail which is resistant to tampering. We want verifiable, independent proof of how a person voted. If one buys a lottery ticket one comes out of the shop with evidence of the numbers chosen. I accept one cannot do that in an election but, in effect, one can leave the lottery ticket behind in a box so that there is an independent way to see if the right vote was recorded. I am nervous about this and I am more nervous having heard the experts, particularly their discussions of the software which will be used.

That is not to say that computers are not reliable. They are very reliable, but there are also many ways in which they can let us down. Programmes such as Microsoft Access can fail to deliver the right results and I am wary of the software being used in this case. I am wary of anyone who claims computer technology is 100% reliable, as I know from bitter experience how computers can crash and records can be lost or changed. I was trying to put some information into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet recently but the programme kept changing the year 2003 to 2008, despite my best efforts to reformat the information.

Many tests of electronic voting software, and some real elections, have shown up significant flaws. In an election in Broward County, Florida, 134 voters were disenfranchised because the electronic voting machine showed no votes and there was no way to show those voters' intentions. That election was decided by 12 votes, so the fact that those 134 voters were disenfranchised may have significantly altered the result.

In the 2000 US presidential election nobody could explain why one area in Florida gave Al Gore minus 16,022 votes. I can appreciate that his vote might have fallen in certain counties, but it must be the ultimate indignity to be awarded minus votes in a real election.

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