Sir, – Michael McNamara bemoans the fact that we still use "pencil and paper and manual counting" (Letters, May 29th).
It may seem medieval or even prehistoric at times, but paper-based voting is less prone to errors than electronic voting and – most significantly – trusted and verifiable when it comes to counting.
Electronic voting machines are prone to errors in the booth among those who are not used to technology, or they may just malfunction. They can be subject to tampering from domestic or foreign parties, through hacking or those in the supply chain altering the machines.
Most significantly, electronic counts cannot be independently verified, and therefore cannot be fully trusted.
If we cannot trust the results, then the democratic process is easily undermined.
The gold standard of electronic voting system is one with a voter-verified paper audit trail that can be counted alongside the electronic votes to verify the results. So even if we do eventually switch to e-voting, we’ll still be using a pencil and paper and counting by hand! – Yours, etc,
BRIAN McARDLE,
Leixlip,
Co Kildare.