Reports that Fianna Fail ministers wanted to give an explicit public commitment that the electronic voting machines would be used in the future almost defy belief, given the second report of the Commission on Electronic Voting published last week.

To be fair, the wonderfully comprehensive report does not rule out the use of electronic voting in the future . . . it actually finds that the new system "has the potential to be superior to the paper system in many significant respects concerning its accuracy".

But whether the electronic voting system can achieve its potential must be seriously open to question. The commission concludes that it can recommend the voting and counting equipment for use at elections "subject to further work", but it adds that it is unable to recommend the crucial election-management software . . . the brains of the system, which prepares elections and aggregates and counts the votes.

It says the software remains under continuous development "and is not of sufficient quality to enable its use to be confidently recommended". Testing also revealed programming errors and suggested the possible existence of others.

Those tests on the software will have confirmed many people's worst fears about electronic voting. The software selected the wrong candidate in a tied election and then compounded the error by reporting incorrectly that a different candidate had been selected. It was also found that errors could arise when reading votes from a disk at the count centre and, most worrying of all, it was possible to manipulate vote data at service centres and count centres without detection by the software.

So much, then, for the government's continued insistence up to May, 2004, that the electronic voting system would be fine for the local and European elections of that year. Two years on, and the government is keen to stress the positives from the new report. The commission concluded that, subject to all its recommendations being carried out, it is "likely that the chosen system can be deployed and used with confidence in the future".

But it is the word "likely" that jumps out in this sentence. There can be no criticism of the commission, which was simply giving its straight and expert opinion, but "likely" is just not good enough when it comes to the integrity of the system used to elect the government of our state.

It would be naive to think that the current paper-based system is perfect and mistakes do not take place. But on the whole, it has served the country well over the past 84 years. A computer-based system may deliver more accurate results, but can we be sure that such a system is operating to the highest software engineering standards? The potential upside from electronic voting is relatively small, the potential downside is catastrophic.

It is understandable that the government wants to rescue something from the mess they have made of the introduction of electronic voting. It spent 50m on a system that there was no particular demand for, without doing the necessary checks and with which there were serious flaws. It arrogantly dismissed the concerns raised by academics and computer experts, only reluctantly agreeing to set up the Commission on Electronic Voting after being harangued by the opposition.

It has been deservedly excoriated for all of this. It is not surprising therefore that the government has been keen to accentuate the positive from last week's report.

"We're talking about very minor adjustments, " environment minister Dick Roche claimed on Tuesday.

But developing alternative election management software to use with the existing voting machines is surely not a "minor adjustment". The manufacturers of the machines have also warned that all 7,500 machines would have to undergo significant work if the recommendations of the report are to be implemented.

And, for this writer at least, there are no measures that will improve confidence in electronic voting. Three years ago we were told everything was perfect with the system. Now we know that was far from the case. If the commission had not been set up, we would have been blissfully unaware of the problems that have emerged and that is a genuinely frightening thought.

It is not enough for the system to be beyond question; voters have to have absolute confidence that it is beyond question. Electronic voting may ultimately be the way of the future but, for now at least, paper and pencil looks a much safer bet. If that involves writing off the entire 50m outlay on the voting system, then the government will just have to take that hit. The price of not doing so is potentially incalculable.