Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

I have read it in great detail to try to understand the issues the commission has raised. I would like to put on the record the paragraph that Deputy McCormack left out, which is singularly significant. The commission went out of its way to ensure it was upfront in its executive summary by stating:

The Commission wishes to emphasise that its conclusion is not based on any finding that the system will not work, but on the finding that it has not been proven at this time to the satisfaction of the Commission that it will work.

This is where we lie at the moment. As other Members placed much on the record, I also wish to put on the record the commission's own findings as there is an important reason it did this. The commission's report states:

testing carried out by experts retained by the Commission on a significant sample of the voting machines deployed to returning officers confirms that the system can accurately and consistently record voter preferences;

testing of the counting software carried out by experts retained by the Commission using voting information from pilot tests during previous elections in Ireland confirms that it accurately counted the votes recorded at these elections;

parallel testing of the counting software programme carried out by experts retained by the Commission using a large number of sample data sets and a similar counting programme developed for the Commission confirms that it can accurately count votes in most situations, including unusual or difficult electoral situations;

miniature end-to-end testing of the system carried out by experts retained by the Commission confirms that it can accurately record and count the votes in the context of multiple simultaneous elections.

They are pretty definitive on much of the testing the commission carried out. The report made little or no criticism of the machines. The commission seemed to concentrate on the software, the counting——

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