Sir, – Kathy Sheridan’s article on the vote-counting process makes a strong case for the value of Ireland’s paper-based, pencil-and-tally electoral system. She is right that it inspires a high degree of public trust and that is something worth preserving (“No one’s laughing at our ‘peann luaidhe’ elections now,” June 3rd).But we should be clear about one point: the long count times are not an inevitable feature of the single transferable vote (STV), it’s a choice. Strangely, it is not well known in Ireland that places like Scotland (local elections) and Malta have already shown that STV can be run with paper ballots and optical scanning to get results in a few hours. They still maintain transparent verification, observer access and a full paper trail. The trade-off isn’t paper versus trust, but how much time and manual processing we choose to keep in the system.If the extended counts are part of the civic theatre, that’s fine. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for a technical necessity. We can keep the peann luaidhe and have fast results if we want to. – Yours, etc,DONAL QUINN,Barcelona,Spain.