Kathy Sheridan: On Tuesday, the Government's representative on Prime Time managed, (unwittingly of course), to express in a sentence what the combined Opposition has been labouring to say for months. If a paper trail was incorporated in the proposed new electronic voting system, said Pat The Cope Gallagher solemnly, "it could throw up two results". Well, exactly.
And, he might have added, did we occupy a parallel universe where reason and logic were seen as forces for good - while one result would be verifiable, the other would not. And which one would be verifiable, recountable, before the eyes of the electorate? The one the Government is so mysteriously anxious to avoid.
In fact, the Government's approach to everything about this topic has been mystifying. Arrogance alone hardly explains why, at every turn, opposition parties, experts and citizens have been stonewalled, forced to dig into personal time and funds to seek information vital to the exercise of democracy, obliged to watch impotently as red herrings were tossed in, and straw men erected and knocked down in response to arguments that were never made.
Mr Joe McCarthy, a long-standing computer professional and election agent, whose letter appeared in these pages yesterday, has spent €1,275 of his own money trying to get details of the system from the Department of the Environment, through Freedom of Information. Can there be a greater official abuse of the public's right and need to know?
Last April, when Mr McCarthy asked the Department to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the records relating to the counting software and source code from the authors, Powervote, he was told the Department "had no current contract with the supplier". Despite this, 4,450 new machines were soon being delivered to returning officers around the country, a quarter of them before the design was certified by a German testing institution in September. The contract with Powervote/Nedap was finally signed a week before Christmas. This agrees, on our behalf, to the purchase of 6,000 new voting machines, of a type which has never been piloted in Ireland, according to Mr McCarthy. He also notes that the UK Electoral Commission, which piloted the same system - twice - on machines rented from the returning officer in Dublin, decided that electronic voting was premature and not to use the system until it was safe.
Here, when Pat The Cope was asked about getting an Electoral Commission of our very own, he replied that this "will take time to establish", as though the electorate had set some immutable deadline for electronic voting, which the Government was powerless to change.
The official response has been roughly similar to that granted to enquiries on our stance on Iraq. Bluster and bombast not remotely related to the questions asked, allied in this case, to the most patronising - "it's easier for everyone" - publicity campaign in advertising history.
So let's get a few of the straw men and red herrings out of the way.
"The system has been used, tried and tested here." We know that it has been used. We can not know, without a verifiable paper record, that it has passed any significant test.
"The new system will ensure the elections this June are the most accurate and therefore the most democratic in our history." See above. Also remember the machines have been programmed to allocate preference votes in exactly the same random fashion as the old counting system. What does "more accurate or democratic" actually mean? "The majority of Irish people understand and react well to change - the smooth introduction of the euro was a recent positive experience." Charlie McCreevy. The only suggestion that the Irish people might be too backward or stupid to press a button has come from the Government's own advertising campaign.
"A paper record would flout a Supreme Court ruling protecting the anonymity of an individual's vote." Martin Cullen. Can he really believe that this is insurmountable?
"This is what the Oireachtas has chosen to do. This isn't some sort of zealot approach to the system on my behalf." Mr Cullen again, hours before it emerged that he was still consulting with the Attorney General on how to make the process legal. "We should not need international experts to tell us [about problems with electronic voting] because we export more [computer software] to these countries than they ever created themselves."
The Taoiseach, rejecting the view of yet another distinguished American academic, about the proposed paperless system. Anyone know where the parent companies of Intel, Hewlett Packard, etc hail from? "Paper records are not kept in any jurisdiction where electronic voting is used, including California." Charlie McCreevy. True, though not for much longer by all accounts.
"Paper record-keeping is impractical. What happens if [the printer] breaks down on polling day?" Mr McCreevy. Someone comes and fixes it - just like they will if the voting machine breaks down (we hope).
Space has run out. However, we look forward to the day when Mr McCarthy gets his €1,275 back with thanks from a grateful government.