Ireland dumps e-voting machines that America still uses

In a final vote of no confidence, Ireland’s ill-fated e-voting machines are finally headed to the scrap heap.

Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan said he was “glad to bring this sorry episode to a conclusion on behalf of the taxpayer”.

“From the outset, this project was ill-conceived and poorly delivered by my political predecessors and as a result it has cost the taxpayer €55 million.

Plans to roll out the machines on a national basis in the 2004 local and European elections were abandoned by the then minister for the environment, Martin Cullen, after a report from an independent commission raised issues about their reliability.

In this country, the U.S. wasted almost $4 billion (with a "b"), via the Help American Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, on the very same type of worthless, unreliable, easily hacked machines that the Irish are smart enough to get rid of entirely...

In Ireland's case, after it was discovered almost immediately that these things were junk, not worthy of any public democracy, they shelved them and are now finally trashing them entirely. We have known them to be junk for nearly a decade.

In our case, however we will still be using these same, oft-failed, easily-manipulated, secret vote counting pieces of crap across the entire nation, once again, to determine the results our 2012 Presidential election.