Madam, - Tom Stoppard sums up the problem nicely in his play Jumpers: "It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting." With closed electronic voting we cannot trust the counting - it is a given in the IT industry that complex software systems inherently cannot be proven to operate correctly.
Without paper trails there is no way to validate results and there will always be the suspicion that results could be subverted. Given human nature, they will be at some point. Paper trails, please. - Yours, etc.,
NEIL FLANAGAN, Kerrymount Rise, Foxrock, Dublin 18.