Michael Kitt (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Gallagher, to the House.

I support electronic voting and counting. As the Minister of State said, this system has been in operation in The Netherlands and in many cities in Germany over the past ten years where it has been shown to be successful in elections. However, when we talk about electronic voting and counting, we must also include the issue of the electoral register. It is important that the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government encourages local authorities to ensure that every effort is made to have those eligible included on the register. There are always problems during elections when people say they have a vote but are not on the register. Galway County Council has often recommended that the operation of the population census should be changed to include placing people on the electoral register.

The Acting Chairman will know, having been a member of the council, that there have been many proposals from local authorities and the Department to close the smaller polling stations. I would not like to think the excellent idea of electronic voting and counting will be used to further reduce the number of polling stations. Local authorities should examine their schemes and make it easy for people to get to the polling station. There were proposals in 1985 that there should be a minimum of 1,000 people voting at a polling station for it to remain open. If that were to happen in west Galway or in the Minister of State's constituency people would have to travel long distances to a polling station. That does not make voting more accessible. When we speak of these machines, we should not talk aboutreplacing people as a number one goal. It should be about making the polling station moreaccessible and these machines available. Let us also hope these machines will be for stations with 200 people voting, as well as the 1,000 people threshold that some local authorities have proposed.

It will be exciting to run the local and European elections in June through the electronic voting system. Three million people will have the opportunity of voting on these machines which we saw in operation in the Mansion House last week. Electronic voting can bring many benefits such as making our elections more accurate and democratic. One of the deficiencies of the current system is that many votes are not counted because they are invalid. Senator Finucane has spoken on the Order of Business about his particular difficulties when the count comes down to one or two votes between candidates. He is in favour of electronic voting.

In the last European elections, almost five years ago, more than 6,000 people who went to the polls had their votes ruled out. Some deliberately spoiled their votes but most did not. It is worth considering the change that could make to a few seats because those invalid votes can have a major bearing on the results of elections. In the last local elections in 1999, for example, 21,000 votes were deemed to be invalid while 40 council seats were decided by less than 50 votes. Anyone who believes in democracy should want to improve the system and it should be a key priority for any Government to ensure that every vote is counted accurately.

Elections are crucial to the functioning of democracy. They provide for the ordinary transfer of power but they also help to cement the citizens' trust and confidence in Government. Change in the running of elections tends to come slowly and I can see why people who areaccustomed to the present system would perhaps be loath to change. It can be difficult for candidates if, as we saw in the last general election, the count continues for several days and the votes counted can change from a plus to a minus very quickly. That demonstrates the drawback of the present system, as the Minister of State pointed out.

I am very glad the Minister of State spoke about the Dutch-UK company Nedap, appointed following an international tender to deliver an electronic solution to the voting and counting process. More than 400,000 people used the system in 2002 in the general election and the referendum on the Treaty of Nice and their response has been very positive. Successful operation is the most worthwhile possible test of reliability. The Minister of State made a good point about what people describe as interference. Why have they not talked about the security of the ballot box rather than raising many questions about the security of this new system which has been subjected to rigorous testing by a range of independent agencies? It has been independently certified in Germany and in the Netherlands and an Irish company undertook an independent code review of the software.

The people have always, rightly, had confidence in those who administer our elections and will continue to administer them. This time they will be using a system that eliminates human error in the voting and counting. It is a system that will ensure that the results declared reflect the exact intent of the voters more closely than any system used before. The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Cullen, has considered the different comments on the new system — some informed, some not — but he has to choose whether to listen to wild conspiracy theories about people wanting to undermine our electoral system or go with an accurate and democratic system.