Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 5, line 5, after "TO" to insert the following:

"ESTABLISH A BODY TO BE KNOWN AS AN COIMISIÚN UM VÓTÁIL LEICTREONACH, OR IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, THE COMMISSION ON ELECTRONIC VOTING, AND TO".

The purpose of the amendment is to provide for an Irish title for the Commission on Electronic Voting. In his response to my earlier motion, which I regret was not accepted, the Minister stated that his reason for proceeding with the Bill today was the requirement that the commission be established on a statutory basis. While I accept that this is the case, this could be achieved by dealing separately with Part 3 of the Bill which deals with the establishment of the commission. The Labour Party would probably agree if the Minister were to make such a proposal.

The House and the country owe a debt of gratitude to the commission which was established at a time of political conflict and partisan views in the House on the proposed electronic voting system. This was no fault of Deputies on this side who sought at the Joint Committee on the Environment and Local Government to persuade the Government to approach the issue on an all-party basis. The Government decided unilaterally to proceed with the system and ran into difficulty. As Deputies Kenny and Allen reminded the House, it was only on foot of a motion tabled by the Labour Party, Fine Gael and the Green Party that it was eventually forced to establish the commission.

The members of the commission were given the difficult job of reporting on the electronic voting system selected within a difficult timeframe, a fact to which they drew attention in their report. The commission was also given limited terms of reference and correctly drew attention in its report to these limitations, which prevented it from examining anything other than the system of electronic voting already chosen by the Government. This precluded it, for example, from examining the issue of a voter verifiable audit trail and other matters. While not stated bluntly, it broadly hints in its report that it would like its terms of reference changed to enable it to examine wider issues.

In the report submitted to the Ceann Comhairle last Friday, the commission did a service to democracy by asserting and exercising its independence and severely criticising the proposed system of electronic voting. The report echoes the criticisms contained in a document produced by the Labour Party last autumn and ridiculed by the Minister at the time.

The Minister has many questions to answer about his stewardship of this issue. Deputies have referred to his stewardship of expenditure on the system, for which he did not have authority. At the time he committed expenditure, primary legislation allowing him to do so had not been enacted. The legislation in question is the Bill which would allow electronic voting to be used in the local and European Parliament elections. Despite the fact that it had not been enacted, the Minister proceeded to spend €52 million of taxpayer's money. He had no authority to do so and has not yet made himself accountable to the House.

The Minister repeatedly assured the House and the committee examining the issue that the system chosen was safe and reliable and had been thoroughly tested. It was a matter of placing our trust in him. The assurances the Minister gave this House were blown out of the water last Friday when the commission published its report. The software has not yet been fully developed for this system. The commission stated that as the software version proposed for use in the forthcoming elections is as yet unknown, it is impossible for anyone to certify its accuracy. There are also issues of secrecy. An individual voter could effectively be intimidated or corrupted while casting a vote. An insider could overcome the random methods used for the storage of votes in the ballot module. The people engaged by the commission were able to bypass the security measures and gain complete control of the PC. The count could be manipulated. All these issues were raised either by Members in the various debates in the House or in the committee, or were raised by technical experts who made submissions to the committee. These concerns were flatly denied by the Minister.

I recommend the amendment but this debate is surreal. We are debating a Bill to enable something to take place that cannot take place. This is happening against a background of misinformation given to the House previously by the Minister. In my speech on Second Stage, I wondered aloud what this was all about. Why was Fianna Fáil so anxious to get a system of electronic voting into place? We suspected at the time that it was seriously flawed and now we know from the commission report that it was seriously flawed. We are owed an explanation and the commission is owed the gratitude of the House and of the country for blowing the whistle on such a flawed system of electronic voting.

See this speech in context