Sir, – In 2003, I co-authored the Labour Party report titled Electronic Voting – a threat to democracy. This report showed the many gaping holes in the proposed e-voting system. Former minister for the environment Martin Cullen chose to ignore the findings of our report and lashed out with a personal attack on the authors. He also ignored reports from independent experts including Joe McCarthy and Margaret McGaley.
Within a week of presenting our report at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Environment and Local Government on December 10th, 2003, the order to spend €50 million of taxpayers’ money to buy 7,000 overpriced adding machines was rushed through.
Now, nearly a decade later, we are to get back €70,000 scrap value for these 7,000 overpriced calculators.
I guess the scrappage money might pay part of ex-minister Cullen’s pension this year. Where is the accountability? – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Now that the “scandal” of the e-voting machines is to be brought to a close with the scrapping of all and sundry, I have to say I am disappointed that the machines used in the Meath and North Dublin constituencies in the 2002 general election are to be lost to future generations. These are a historic part of our electoral history and should be preserved, not scrapped.
At the time that it was announced that the future of the machines was to be left to a tendering process I made preliminary inquiries to the minister about one set of the machines being preserved and donated to the politics department of my university. Before I had the chance to develop the idea I was redirected to the tendering process yet to commence.
Have we no sense of the historic that these particular machines are to be simply scrapped and cannibalised? Is their use too recent and so clouded by controversy to be acknowledged as historic?
Some immediate intervention is required to prevent this wholesale dismantling of part of our electoral history. At a very minimum a set should be donated to the national museum, with our universities at least given the opportunity to take them. And surely Meath and Fingal County Councils would also like to place a set on display at their headquarters as they are part of their respective histories?
This missive should not be mistaken for an attempt to save all of the machines. Clearly the unused ones have no value beyond a symbolic example of government profligacy and the sooner we bring an end to that fiasco the better. – Yours, etc,