THE DECISION by Minister for the Environment John Gormley to abandon electronic voting has been criticised by the Opposition, who say he took too long to scrap the system, which has cost the taxpayer more than €51 million.
Mr Gormley announced his decision at University College Cork yesterday, saying the cost of adapting the machines to make election results verifiable would come to €28 million, a sum which could not be justified in the current economic climate.
He also said the issue of public confidence in the system remained a problem, particularly in the light of recent decisions by the Dutch and German governments to abandon e-voting due to problems.
Mr Gormley refused to accept his predecessors as ministers for the environment, Noel Dempsey and Martin Cullen, were guilty of a huge waste of taxpayers’ money by acquiring e-voting machines before their reliability had been properly checked.
“I am not in the business of reprimanding colleagues. I am not the Taoiseach. It is up to the Taoiseach in relation to colleagues and the way that they have behaved, but certainly I would say that, at the time, they were probably following best international practice.”
Pressed on the matter, he said: “Well, of course, if you find at the end of the day that you cannot use machines, you clearly have to classify that as wastage of money.
“It was seen at the time as a way of actually recouping money; they said that they could save money over a 20-year period or so.”
The Minister said he did not foresee any difficulty in ending long-term storage contracts entered into by his predecessors.
He said as the present Minister for the Environment the buck stopped with him, but he hoped to get “some credit” for making the decision.
“Frankly, I did not create this particular difficulty. I came into office and I had to deal with this problem, and now I am dealing with it. It requires a certain amount of prudence, a certain amount of decisiveness, I have done all of that.
“I have not rushed into this. I have looked into all the options, and I have come to this conclusion, and I think it is the only viable conclusion we could have come to,” said Mr Gormley, who commissioned his first report on the issue just under a year ago.
However, Fine Gael environment spokesman Phil Hogan said Ministers had been the last people in the country to realise e-voting was an unworkable disaster.
“The Government and John Gormley must have been the only people in Ireland not to cop on that e-voting was an absolute disaster,” said Mr Hogan, who claimed the cost to date had been €60 million.
“After almost two years as Minister why did it take Mr Gormley so long to make this decision? It was inevitable the e-voting machines were going to be scrapped, so why did he persist in backing their retention ever since he got his knees under the Cabinet table?”
Mr Hogan said the State was continuing to pay huge storage costs because of 25-year contracts which had been entered into even though the shelf-life of the machines was only 20 years.
The same point was made by Labour Party environment spokesman Ciarán Lynch, who welcomed the Minister’s decision but said it was a fiasco that had rumbled on for far too long.
“These machines have been gathering dust at the taxpayers’ expense for the last five years, and at a time when we can ill afford any further waste of public money. At least we now have a resolution to the matter.”