A Nedap E-Voting Machine, of which we have many...

Back in 2004, I organised a public meeting in Carrick on Shannon to try and highlight the folly of the State investing in the unsafe and unnecessary technology of Electronic Voting.

The meeting wasn’t very well attended, which didn’t surprise me, given that the subject wasn’t particularly topical at the time and that the expenditure of public money doesn’t attract as much media attention as it does today.

At that time, the Minister for the Environment, Martin Cullen, hadn’t signed the contract with the Dutch company, Nedap, to buy the machines. A number of weeks later, an Oireachtas Committee recommended that the contract not be signed, but Minister Cullen went ahead anyway, on the advice of his Department officials, and signed the contract with Nedap for €53m.

Subsequent to this, pressure from public groups like Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-Voting, the Government eventually established a Commission to investigate any issues that existed in relation to the system. This system found that the machines were not safe to use, and the rest is history.

Last week, Green Party Minister for the Environment, John Gormley, finally put an end to this fiasco, and announced that the machines would not be used in Irish elections and will be scrapped in the near future. This has been consistent with the Green Party’s views on Electronic Voting both in Opposition and in Government.

This episode should serve as a reminder of the folly of using technology for technology’s sake, particularly when it comes to taxpayers money. It also raises serious questions about the credibility of Martin Cullen and several public servants in the Department of the Environment, who ignored overwhelming advice from people who were far more qualified than they were to be making decisions of this nature.

€53m, and more for storage, is a high price to pay for what basically amounts to stupidity.