Few what-if scenarios curdle the blood like the near-successful Fianna Fáil plan to bulldoze ahead with an electronic voting system 22 years ago. It was the digital equivalent of a government paying a private company to bundle all our votes off to a hidden location for a secret count, before emerging with the final result. An unverifiable result, to be clear. No paper trail or independent verification processes were built into the system.
There was a rationale of sorts behind the effort. Ireland had seen marathon counts, but never one to equal the notorious 2000 US presidential count which, after a vicious 35-day legal battle in the swing state of Florida, ultimately favoured George W Bush over Al Gore. The winning margin was 537 votes out of nearly 6 million. Raging disputes over “butterfly” ballots (confusing layout), “dimpled”/“hanging”/”pregnant” chads (bits of paper remaining or dangling in voters’ punch cards), illegal overseas ballots and much else were finally settled by a (still fiercely debated) Supreme Court decision. All of which caused a massive rush to electronic voting in the aftermath.
A Celtic Tigerish Ireland took a look and decided it wanted one too. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said we were a “laughing stock” with our use of the “peann luaidhe”. We had grown too sophisticated for the aul’ paper ballots, stubby pencils, and interminable counts and recounts surveyed by gimlet-eyed tally-people. Nedap voting machines were duly bought, and the plan was revving towards lift-off when a key resister called Margaret McGaley – then a scholar working on a PhD on electronic voting – told a Dáil committee that it posed “a genuine threat to our democracy”. Sanity prevailed. The estimated final cost of scrappage and machine storage was €50 million to €60 million.
In 2018, two years after Donald Trump’s first election, we learned that the electronic voting systems of 21 US states had been targeted by Russian hackers, and some had been “actually successfully penetrated”, in the words of the US head of cybersecurity. The targeting might have been exploratory investigations for system vulnerabilities to be exploited later, experts said.
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An electoral system is only as good as the people believe it to be. In 2018, four out of five Americans were somewhat or very concerned that the country’s voting system might be vulnerable to computer hackers, according to a poll by NBC News/SurveyMonkey. A few years later, Trump was able to persuade tens of millions of Americans that the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden had been “rigged”, claims which led the way to an attempted coup. The current Trump government is run entirely by men and women whose jobs depend on parroting their boss’s demented lie.
Without the combined firepower of experts such as McGaley, the media and thinking politicians back in 2004, we too might be living in terror of hack attacks or hisses of disinformation alleging a “rigged” system. The hints were there after the recent byelections, but the beauty of our process is that they had nowhere to land, no tricky machine to point at. Under our counting system, every single one of the people’s votes is made visible – transparent, incontrovertible, incorruptible.
As the byelection counts opened, the presence of well-organised, cross-party tally men and women felt like a rare balm for a reason. It’s only partly about the theatre of the early tallies, the transfers and the civic engagement which all of that invites; it is really about bolstering that priceless faith in the process. In a time when fair is foul and foul is fair, we meddle with it at our peril.
[ What byelection results say about the rise of right-wing parties and candidatesOpens in new window ]
Our counts take longer for obvious reasons: because of our intricate single transferable vote system, because we are ultra-careful, and also because we don’t start counting till the following day. That’s unlike say, Sweden, which can release preliminary results on election night due to its much simpler party-list system which enables a speedy count to be conducted at polling stations the moment the polls close, before a later centralised final count. Finland, too, is much quicker than Ireland because of its simpler open-list PR system with no transfer rounds, and because it does a quick preliminary count at polling stations on election night before central verification. Another timesaver under those systems – if that is what we’re seeking here – is fewer independents. Independents must form or join a registered party and submit a list on time. Our system says yes to everybody.
We’ve been through this before. The interminable ballot papers in the 2024 European Parliament and local elections generated fresh discussions about new electoral systems. Some political scientists proposed hybrid versions of the list system and electronic counting, customised of course for the Irish love of the slow burn.
[ The Irish Times view on election counts: an unnecessary endurance testOpens in new window ]
The real question is why now, as big tech’s malign forces loom over an increasingly addled, edgy and paranoid world, we should mess with one system that rightly makes us proud. If it’s just to hurry things along, we should probably have another deep un-AI-aided think. What could be wrong with a slow election? Like slow cooking, or slow travel, or slow fashion, it’s exactly what the world needs now.
