Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

It further stated that the software is not of sufficient quality to enable its use to be confidently recommended and that functional testing has revealed programming errors. It states there are significant and important vulnerabilities:

Firstly, it was found, when reading in votes at a count centre from a CD received from a service centre, that it is possible to read in the votes from an incorrect service centre. It was also possible to read in votes from the same service centre twice and those from another service centre not at all. This suggests that there are no checks carried out within the software to ensure, for example, that election data, including votes, are attributed to the correct candidates . . . . Thirdly, and most significantly, it was found possible to manipulate vote data by directly editing entries in the election file stored in the Microsoft Access database.

Is the Taoiseach seriously and with a straight face standing up in the House and defending this system? Is he telling the House that the hardware works well but not the software? It is like his Government; the hard necks work well but there is no software.

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