Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

The Labour Party has studied the proposed electronic voting system in depth. We published a detailed report on the Government's proposed system last November. Since then a wide variety of technical experts have all expressed the same doubts about the system. Most of them have focused on the one salient fact on which the Government is silent in the amendment published today, namely, the fact that under the system proposed by the Government, the voter has no way of being certain that the vote which he or she casts is accurately recorded by the voting machine and that software is thereafter not over-ridden by a corruption of the count centre software. The voter is expected to have blind trust in the technology.

Who can have blind trust in this Government? It has broken every promise it made before the election. It has emasculated the freedom of information legislation; it has constantly sought to do away with spending limits in elections and the need to account for spending and it is seeking to put structures in place that will facilitate the politicisation and break-up of the Civil Service. The last thing this Government should be trusted with is counting votes. I commend the motion to the House.

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