Cumbersome but system has great transparency

The inexorable process of picking a new government is well under way. All those weeks of literature being pushed through letterboxes, campaigning on the doorsteps, anger and cross talk on the radio, seemingly endless hours of what passes for debate on the television. The 'great debates’ are, in fact anything but . . . since the days of Garret FitzGerald and Charlie Haughey they have been a ritual of two people setting out their stalls and following instructions to avoid any major disasters.Interestingly, the 'face-off’between Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny last week came as close as any yet to a debate. Both had started with their agenda as to precisely what they had to say and a great determination by their 'backroom boys’ that they should make sure to say it.But there was a degree of cross-talk, contradiction, demands for setting out of answers to certain policy points, and even one or two 'hard questions’. All that said, it would be interesting to know precisely how many stayed to the end of the TV discussion. Really, it was too long for all but the political anoraks.There is a great finality about the process of voting and then the ritual of counting those votes. We don’t have 'hanging chads’ such as in the United States, when the courts found themselves ruling on whether papers were properly perforated by the official stamps of polling booths. But we have our own version of the suspense in the fact that our electoral system is somewhat cumbersome to administer when it comes to counting the votes. For instance, a surplus can take maybe five hours to transfer . . . given that the second preference marked on every paper has to be examined and counted.What our system has also is a remarkable transparency. The votes are emptied out of the boxes in front of hundreds of witnesses, be they political hacks, reporters, or just hangers-on who want to be at the centre of some drama which can go on for a number of days. The process of electronic voting could never hold the same drama, transparency and ritual which is manifested by the count. In e-voting, one presses a series of buttons, you hope that the software is up to the process of recording your vote, you hope that no one can hack into that software, and then, when you demand the result, it spits out that result in a matter of seconds. Then, once more, you hope that the answer is correct, there being no 'paper trail’ which might be followed, as there is with our present somewhat cumbersome and possibly quaint system.Part of the attraction of our system may well be subjective - it may be coloured by the experiences of more than 30 years as a 'hack’ at election counts. But I will take a lot of convincing that e-voting can be as fair or as transparent.