Before launching any product on any market, the vendor needs to convince the consumer of its worth. No other product on the market rivals it in terms of price, efficiency, usability blah, blah, blah. Without first-hand use of the product, the consumer needs to be hit with a barrage of PR, marketing and advertising. Any pre-launch leak that indicates problems with the product can floor it. Negative word of mouth has a habit of spreading quicker than positive reviews. And if the core functionality of the product is a failure, you're urinating against the prevailing ill wind.

Was all of this a consideration for Martin Cullen, you may well ask? The government needed to sell this product to the citizen. Voting integrity would not be compromised; every vote would be accounted for and greater protection the virtual ballot box was assured. Their product launch did nothing to quell the Chinese whispers that machines could be rigged. At this late stage, the faith of the electorate will never be restored in electronic voting. It's time to scrap the whole project, improve the paper system, tidy up the electoral register and learn from the mistakes that were made.

Everyone is not in agreement however that the project should be shelved. In his Sunday column in the Tribune, Richard Delevan opines that

"The only group of people who benefit from the existing system of paper ballots are the tallymen, who retain their colourful role in Irish political life, and the media, who get to stretch an election into an extra day or two of coverage. Joe Soap gets no added value."

If the assertions of the Independent Commission on Electronic Voting are to be believed, Joe Soap gets poor value from the proposed e-voting machines. He cannot be reassured that electronic "vote early and vote often" doesn't occur by means of hacking. Thankfully, despite the ramshackle handling, I'm glad to see that the government has valued the vote ahead of the Euro. No amount of money wasted on this is as precious as the integrity of the franchise.

Not meaning to pick on Richard's article, but he infers that Ireland's reputation as a world-class environment for doing e-business has been damaged somehow because of the failure of e-voting. He points out that the Revenue Online Service has taxpayers making their tax returns in their droves by electronic means.

"If we can overcome our fears about technology when it comes to our money,
surely we can find a way to do it with our votes.".

This reinforces my opinion that we should not be as carefree with our attitudes towards the right to vote as we are with the Yankee dollar. Money will come and go in these heady Celtic Tiger days, but the vote was given to the Irish people as a consequence of the ultimate sacrifices made some decades ago. Are we to fumble in the greasy till again for the sake of some misspent money?

tags:evoting

Published by Colm.