Sheila Terry, who lost out on a seat in Dublin West, this weekend admitted that the question "had crossed my mind over the last few days". Terry stressed that four years on, she had to accept the result, stating: "What's done is done." However, she added: "The results possibly could be questionable. What can I do? There was no recourse open to me bar going to the courts and I wasn't willing to do that. But I'll always say, 'I wonder could I have been denied my seat'."

Terry said that plans for electronic voting must now be finally shelved. "The Irish electorate is happy with it [the old system]. It's part of our tradition and we enjoy it.

This [e-voting] has proven to be a farce. It would be very hard to convince candidates that this system would be safe again."

The second report of the Commission on Electronic Voting, published last week, said it was unable to recommend the election management software, which is used to count votes. It said the software remains under continuous development "and is not of sufficient quality to enable its use to be confidently recommended".

Testing of the election management software found that it selected the wrong candidate for elimination when there was a tie and that errors could arise when reading votes from a disk at the count centre. It also found that it was possible to manipulate vote data at service centres and count centres without detection by the software.

With all of the focus on how the commission's findings will effect the use of the e-voting system in the future, there has been little attention on the last general election when the system was used in Meath, Dublin North and Dublin West. With the next general election less than a year away, there is no question of any challenge to those results. However, the serious reservations about the system's software will raise fresh questions for defeated candidates in those constituencies in 2002. It also adds to concerns about the level of confidence voters can have in an evoting system where there can be no cross-checks.

Political analyst Odran Flynn said any future e-voting system "should be run in parallel with pencil and paper across the board in every constituency . . . ideally in local elections . . . and the results compared.

Only then would people have the confidence in the integrity of the system. Once that happens, you could go with an electronic system.

Until then, no". Flynn added that parallel testing was "standard practice" with any new computer system.