Crystal clear, please

We all sniggered, truth be told, when the world's greatest democracy could not be sure who the next occupant of the White House would be. The stories of polling clerks across America ferreting about for ballot papers with the right number of punch holes had us rolling on our sides. We laughed too soon. But the saga over counting the votes in the recent local elections is tragic, rather than funny, because of what it has confirmed yet again about the state of public administration in this country. It is not about which widget worked and which one didn't. It is about a bizarre trail of inconsistent and non-transparent decisions. It is as though the vast, noisy debate sparked off in the rest of Europe on whether Poland, and other candidates, are ready to join Europe, never happened - or at least went completely unheard here.

A basic, elementary rule in a modern democracy is that the spending of taxpayers' money should be above reproach and beyond rebuke, and that theoretically is why there is a public procurement act (designed in large part, incidentally, by American advisers) to ensure everyone knows where the money went and why. This did not happen with the supply of information technology for the local elections. There were no competitive procedures on price, delivery or quality. There was a one-stop shop.
Now it may well be that the glitches which humbled the national elections agency are in line with similar IT horrors which have afflicted the rest of the world. The British Passport Office, the Pentagon and the French pensions apparatus have all been laid low in their time. In all those cases, and many others like them, the taxpayers had the satisfaction of knowing someone could be found to take the rap, or be absolved in perfectly admissible circumstances, because there had been an open and transparent tendering procedure. Here the authorities have been falling over themselves with ever more implausible explanations as to why there was no tender conducted for the supply of the election technology.

We are required to believe, on the one hand, that it was all a matter of haste. That somehow, the local elections appeared from nowhere, with head-scratching in all directions as to how, at the last moment, to rub together the cash to pay for them. Thus there was a need for unseemly haste to put a system in place. No matter the money had been allocated in the state budget a year previously and our politicians started eagerly campaigning for office at least half a year ago. The public procurement agency, the watchdog appointed to see that the rules are respected, ought to be the body most concerned to ensure value in exchange for taxpayers' money. Instead, it pleaded that on a technicality - namely the absence of a budget allocation - the elections agency had acted with propriety. Neither the procurement nor the elections agencies dignify themselves by purveying such nonsense.

It is perfectly clear from accounts which have appeared in this newspaper that the elections agency has indeed gone comprehensively and enthusiastically about the task with which it was charged, namely modernising the electoral management and reporting system. The report we published last week showed how the planning and evaluation had proceeded, literally, over a period of years. So why, then, the need for such a scramble to implement the IT systems just a few weeks before the elections? It is said that there will be an inquiry. This is where it should begin.
Taxpayers in this country will become ever more dissatisfied with clear procedures, laid down by Parliament, being abruptly bypassed on the whim of civil servants, for specious reasons. The explanations handed out this week serve only to insult intelligence. Fortunately, in the event that the country does sign up to the European Union, all public tenders must, from the day of accession, be published in the Official Journal of the European Communities, conducted according to the laws and regulations of the European Union and open to every interested company that wants to make a pitch.
And that is as it should be.