David Norris (Independent)

I speak as a confirmed and conscientious Luddite. I have never been attracted to this system for which there is not the slightest demand. Can the Minister of State give any indication that the Irish public demanded this? It seems to be an outbreak of technophilia. I thought I had invented that word until I read a very interesting paper by Mr. Andrew Ó Baoill so I am not alone in suspecting the outbreak of technophilia, the love of gizmos for their own sake. There was no demand for this system. I listened to some of the Minister of State's speech and his opening remarks on the lines that it is good enough for the Dutch and who are we to object. There are many things that are good enough for the Dutch and my colleague, Senator McCarthy, will specify a few for which the Irish people might not have such an appetite. It is a slightly lazy argument to say the Dutch and the Germans use this. So what? They do many other things we would not want to do and if we to invent a system here we need to have it checked; the check by Zerflow showed up several defects.

One of my objections relates to the elimination of the human element. The pap about making things easy is the same nonsense that destroyed the Irish language. I learned this when we had our own lovely cló Gaelach script and there were words in Irish which originated in the Irish culture like "an bóthar" now replaced by "ród". Grammar was simplified to the point of making the language so dull, boring and uninspiring that nobody would waste ten minutes trying to learn it and that is why it is practically extinct now. The Government is going to do the same with voting by making it so easy that people will just have to sit down and push a button in between stuffing Mars bars into their mouths and watching the television.

Getting out to vote is a very good and sociable activity. I object to spoiling all the fun. It was immense fun in the old days when I went down to Marlboro Street where there would be members of Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil. It was a real occasion. What will happen to the human interest that generated an excitement in politics on election night because the tallymen could be marvellously accurate? This system will be a dull, bland technological exercise in which the electorate will eventually lose interest completely. It is not even secure.

The principal point is the need for a paper trail. Mr. Ó Baoill writes:

Rather than concentrate on abandoning a manual system that was generally sufficient for the task at hand, the government should instead investigate means of enabling members of the public to participate more broadly and deeply in the political process.

Hear, hear. Let the Minister not come back here and bellyache when no one votes because I will point to the record and say with some satisfaction, and in a spiteful way, that I told him so.

The question of technophilia is illustrated in various answers, including that given by the Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach, Deputy Hanafin, who is a decent person and a good Minister of State. She said that the aim of the Government is "to make maximum use of available technology while ensuring that citizens can still get direct access to public officials". The primary instance is technology, while the human voters come second. We must make maximum use of the technology to show the Germans and the Dutch that we are as slick and sophisticated as they are — I do not care — while the voters come second. That is the wrong order. The voters should come first and the intention of the Government and the technology should be to facilitate the voters.

As regards auditability, which is the voting equivalent of accountability, a woman called Lynn Landes states:

Voting takes three-steps: marking, casting and counting the ballot. Only the first step should be private (although for the severely disabled that may not always be possible), but the second two steps to voting must be open to public scrutiny. That is the only way we can ensure that elections are fair and honest.

That is the position I would adopt.

I mentioned Zerflow consultants because we talked about examining the system and having a test. These are the people the Government commissioned and they found a certain level of vulnerability. Their report described several flaws in the proposed system. These revolved around security shortcomings in the system, with the report claiming that the new system opened up the voting process to several new forms of attack and subversion. Opportunities for fraud included the possibility of pasting a dummy ballot paper over the real paper and a proven instance of the keys securing a voting machine being copied by an unauthorised person. The security has been breached. Where are we now? Perhaps the Germans did not mind, but Irish people would have an objection. As other scholars in this area have pointed out, if all the audit trails are internal to the machine, there cannot be any independent audit as it would be technically impossible. That means there would not be any auditability.

The ignorant assumption of unsophisticated people confronted by what they perceive as a sophisticated continental European experience is that the machine is infallible. That is not true. It is obvious that machines can make mistakes. One has only to look at one's ESB bills, for example, to realise what computers can do.