A GREEN Party Minister has finally brought an end to shambling political incompetence and an enormous waste of money by abandoning electronic voting. It was not before time. Even then, Minister for the Environment John Gormley could not publicly admit that a succession of Fianna Fáil ministers were wrong and arrogant in their unswerving support for the electronic project. But, with a final cost to the taxpayer likely to exceed €55 million, that conclusion is self-evident.
Unwillingness to accept responsibility or acknowledge that mistakes were made lies at the heart of this fiasco. Responsibility went right to the top. Even when a government-appointed commission on electronic voting found the machines to be unsafe, the then taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, insisted they would be modified and used. That was the line taken by the ministers involved. No serious mistakes. And therefore no accountability.
It was the same with Ppars, an electronic payment system for the health service. Starting small, at an estimated cost of €9 million in 1997, it ballooned to a cost of €130 million in 2004, before being quietly abandoned by the Health Service Executive in 2007. During that time it was reviewed on five separate occasions by external consultants. But nobody was fired. And nobody took responsibility. These failed exercises can be traced back to a time when Fianna Fáil-led governments went off the rails and abandoned control of the economy to speculators and get-rich-quick merchants.
The Celtic Tiger was still thriving and money was no object in 1999 when Noel Dempsey proposed – and the government agreed – to modernise the voting system. Pilot electronic voting was conducted in three constituencies in 2002 and it operated smoothly. But growing concerns by computer experts and opposition parties about the security of the machines and their inability to provide a paper trail or a recount were ignored. Martin Cullen ordered more than 700 of the machines at a cost of €51 million, only to have them placed in storage in 2004 when a special commission on electronic voting found it was easy to bypass the security system. They have remained under lock and key since then.
The future of the machines was dealt a final blow earlier this year when the German supreme court followed the lead of the Dutch government and ruled against the machines on security grounds. It wasn’t a final “no” to electronic voting, just that the current generation of voting machines was unsatisfactory. John Gormley admitted as much yesterday. It would cost a further €27 million to retro-fit the machines to provide for a recount facility. And, even then, security and public confidence would be an issue. His decision to appoint a taskforce to raise what it can by disposing of the useless machines and ending the long storage leases is a necessary tidying-up operation. But it does nothing to address the fundamental question: who is going to take political responsibility for this fiasco. Who will resign for wasting €55 million of taxpayers’ money?