Dr. Rebecca Mercuri is the leading researcher in the field of electronic voting. Her website is the most comprehensive source of information about electronic voting available on the web. She is strongly opposed to Remote Electronic Voting, and has stated:

"...I will continue to urge municipalities to ONLY consider the purchase of voting systems that include a voter-verified physical audit trail. These systems would include mark-sense (or optically scanned) paper ballots, or kiosks that produce a paper receipt that the voter can review and must drop in a box for recount..."

The Nedap/Powervote system is a kiosk system which does not provide a paper audit trail.

Bruce Schneier is a well known cryptographer and security expert. He has clearly stated his concern about electronic voting in his free monthly newsletter, Crypto-Gram. He is opposed to the use of systems without a paper audit trail (such as the Nedap/Powervote system).

With regard to remote electronic voting, he has stated:

"A secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers."

There are currently no plans to introduce remote electronic voting in Ireland, but the possibility has not been ruled out.

Jason Kitcat founder and co-ordinator of the the free e-democracy project, which researchs and advocates the responsible and appropriate use of Free Software technology in government.

He says:

"Without a paper-trail electronic voting risks the legitimacy of any election result. Technology provides an opacity which prevents proper scrutiny and verification of results. It also undermines the secrecy, reliability and natural trust voters have in the system. All these problems arise at great expense to the government for the new systems necessary whose proprietary nature locks them into using the same supplier for years to come. Electronic voting is a bad idea - it's the inappropriate use of technology in the wrong place. The money could be spent much more effectively elsewhere."