Strasbourg, 17/01/2008 (Agence Europe) - Taking the floor after the vote on Wednesday 16 January, British Labour member Robert Evans was highly critical of the systematic use of Roll Call Vote (RCV) since the beginning of this plenary session. This electronic voting system costs €400 a vote, Mr Evans said. A tidy sum, calculated, he says, by the services of the Parliament secretariat taking into account the amount of paper and printing required for publishing the results, which are then distributed to all MEPs (but not necessarily the amount of time spent on this task by the Parliament personnel). Voting on Tuesday 15 January would therefore have cost nearly €25,000, about the same as that for Wednesday's voting session, Mr Evans told EUROPE.
The irony of the story is that it is the IND/DEM group (which seeks to combat all forms of budgetary wastefulness) that has, as is its right, most often called for this procedure to be used since the beginning of the week in Strasbourg. As Mr Evans sees it, the roll call vote must make it possible to clarify the results of tight votes or obtain a precise picture of the way MEPs vote rather than, as he says the IND/DEM group wants, to “slow down the work of the Parliament”. This accusation was rejected by IND/DEM Chairman Jens-Peter Bonde, who will not be calling for the systematic use of RCV for now, at any rate not until the cost of it has been reduced. Those close to Mr Bonde state that RCV is of interest for achieving greater clarity of votes, greater certainty and greater transparency in results. (A.B.).