Madam, - Even if experts could miraculously rule out invisible system error and symptomless failure, and guarantee total fidelity to voters' selections in a ballot guaranteed secret, mischief is still being done to the electorate by the current proposals on electronic voting.
This is because the vote will no longer be truly and full-bloodedly the voter's own instrument. I say that because I believe the reckoning, as much as the vote itself, belongs to the electorate; and it is not to be expropriated and given over to experts.
Until now, the reckoning was a transparent thing of second nature to voters who, in principle, could execute or supervise any part of the tally themselves; but henceforth the acumen needed rightly to appreciate how their votes are instrumental in the result exceeds what the typical voter possesses. So the secure intuition of the voter as to what she/he is doing is to be abolished in favour of edictal information as to what is happening.
What was true method is turned into mere faith. "Expertise", arcane and inscrutable to the electorate, is to mediate between electoral preference and outcome.
It astonishes me to find no mention anywhere of the deep significance of our needing experts and commission to assure and guarantee what we the electorate ought to be able to vouch for ourselves - our own effective participation. The true significance is that our real vote is being switched for a virtual vote.
Even opposition parties and sceptics are colluding in the misdirection of the entranced by going along with the idea of getting around the lack of public confidence, with assorted modifications. As the project is essentially a scam, public confidence would be a catastrophe for national suffrage.
I believe that the vote and tally should be a deliberate instrument drawn from the stock of common skills. That is the tune to which the entire electoral apparatus should dance; and not the other way about.
I am disgusted by this strange new Government approach: If it ain't broke, break it. - Yours, etc.,
SEAMUS BYRNE,
Francis Street,
Edenderry,
Co Offaly.