50m cost of electronic voting was a huge waste

THE Government has spent up to €50m to date on electronic voting, with no value obtained for the taxpayer until the system goes into use - if it ever does.

Fine Gael slammed the "appalling wastage of taxpayers' money" exposed by the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) and said his report should read as Environment Minister Martin Cullen's P45.

Fine Gael spokesman Bernard Allen said that the report was "damning" of Environment Minister Martin Cullen and his department; and that in any commercial firm the minister's actions would be a firing offence.

But a spokesman for Mr Cullen said the report was "very balanced".

He said it had found it was reasonable for the department to proceed as it had.

"At every stage, the minister and the Government have acted on the basis of official and expert advice and this is the approach we will continue to follow," he said.

To date, the Government has bought more than 7,000 electronic voting machines at a cost of almost €44m.

Consultancy and testing costs amounted to over €500,000 while advertising and promotion of the system cost close to €4m.

Plans to introduce electronic voting for the June 2004 national elections were abandoned in May after the Commission on Electronic Voting said it could not endorse the use of the system at the polls.

The C&AG found: "The project should have been subject to more rigorous cost/benefit analysis in view of the scale of the financial commitments involved."

In June 2002, the Department of the Environment bought 400 voting machines and other equipment for use in the Nice Referendum even though a review had indicated the machines needed modifications which would cost less to do in the factory rather than post delivery.

Pre-delivery, the modifications would have cost €615 per machine.

That compared to the €2,300 cost of sending each machine back to the factory for modification after they had been shipped to Ireland.

The C&AG was told that the order for the machines was made at that time because they would not otherwise have been ready in time for the expected referendum date.

However, in his findings on the issue, he noted that this decision "ultimately resulted in avoidable costs of €680,000 being incurred".

The C&AG also noted that, while the Commission on Electronic Voting (CEV) had said it could not endorse the system's use at the polls for the 2004 elections, this conclusion was not based on any findings that the equipment would not work.