JUST after Bertie Ahern defended electronic voting and said elections after 2007 should be done without “stupid aul pencils”, a Fianna Fail councillor has broken ranks and called for the current e-voting system to be scrapped.

Damien Blake, the outgoing mayor of Letterkenny, has said the €52m spent on electronic voting should now be written off as a “sunk cost”. It would be “bewildering” to use a system that Dutch hackers last month demonstrated could be compromised by someone with access to the machines, he believes.

“Minister Dick Roche has said he will only implement the current e-voting system once it has the full confidence of the public and I don’t think that will ever happen,” said Blake.

Last week Ahern strongly defended e-voting and derided the counting of votes by hand as “our silly aul system”. Unless electronic voting was introduced the country would be a “laughing stock”, he told the Dail.

But the Donegal councillor believes automation can be brought into the counting process while people still vote with pencils.

“We’ve gone about it the wrong way,” said Blake. “If we try to add a paper trail now we are only adding further problems, with printers running out of ink or machines crashing.

“A system that allows people to mark their own piece of paper is a vastly better way of addressing the difficulties of voting.”

The voting machines bought by the government from Dutch firm Nedap are currently in storage as the cabinet ponders what to do after the Commission on Electronic Voting said it could not recommend the system. About €0.5m is expected to be spent improving the software.

Blake says Derry-based firm Opt2Vote has developed an electronic system that counts hand-marked ballots by scanning them using pattern-recognition software. In contrast to the current Nedap system there is a clear paper trail for a recount.

“I would hope moving to a system of automated counting would give less chance for failure.”

Opt2Vote has successfully piloted electronic voting in local and European elections in England and Scotland, which included allowing people to vote over the internet and through interactive digital televisions.

Matthew Brown, its sales director, said the company has met with ministers and officials in the Department of the Environment and is confident its product could improve the Irish election system.

The company is running the system advocated by Blake next week in a parish referendum in Thanet, England. There are 29,000 people, equivalent to a Dail constituency, eligible to vote and Opt2Vote said the counting process will take “a few hours”.

Joe McCarthy, a technology consultant and a critic of the government’s electronic voting system, said he would not support the Opt2Vote system.

“It may be faster at counting but you are still putting your trust in a computer,” he said. “There is too much risk letting mechanical things do something which is better done by humans.”

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