Breaking from today’s Irish Times…
An Offaly-based firm, KMK Metals Recycling, was declared the Government’s preferred bidder out of seven tenders.
The company paid a mere €70,267 for the machines — a steal when one considers the €55 million they have cost the State to date. The price paid also works out at just half the annual €140,000 cost of storing them.
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.
“While this is a scandalous waste of public money, I am happy to say that we will not incur any further costs in the disposal of the machines,” he said.
To help put those costs in perspective, 55 million Euro — the cost of the systems to the state of Ireland to date — is about $69.5 million.
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…
Back to the story…
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.
Amidst mounting concerns over their reliability and storage costs (which, in the years 2004 to 2008 were €658,000, €696,000, €706,000, €489,000 and €204,000 respectively) the idea of e-voting was finally scrapped in 2009. The same fate now awaits the machines themselves.
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 — as revealed on these pages and in study after study across the nation — for nearly a decade.
In our case, however — in the “World’s Greatest Democracy” (which we know we are, because we keep saying so all the time) 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.
[Hat-tip Mark Karlin of BuzzFlash at Truthout]
Probably recycling is ecologically appropriate, but it would have been fabulous to see them piled into a huge funeral pyre.
I will never forget one of the first times I saw Victoria Collier speak, when she said she looks forward to the day we all have a big bonfire with these things. That wouldn’t be environmentally sound, of course. Ireland has to pay all that money instead of making a fire to make it environmentally sound. But isn’t it sad that it’s Ireland, not our own now-laughingstock of a democracy?
Bev Harris said @ 2:
Um, I think you mean “World’s Greatest Democracy”, Bev. Right?
… Brad said…
You misspelled demeritocracy.
Demeritocracy–good one!!!
Go Ireland!!
And from VOICES “You Can’t Make This Crap Up” department — after proclaiming a “mandate” bestowing a wealth of “political capital” based on an unverifiable recall election where exit polls were abused to mislead (and perhaps steal?) the June 5th “accountability moment” for Wisconsin’s Deceiver-in-Chief Scott Walker, we now learn this disturbing news after SCOTUS largely upheld the affordable care act:
What Scottie Didn’t Tell Us: “Divide and Conquer” Literally Includes Killing People
For more, please click HERE.
Ooops, meant to document the statement with a link that WISCONSIN’S DECEIVER-IN-CHIEF with links to the many lies that regularly spew from Walker and his cronies.
Thanks all.
Those who pay attention are flush with reasons to eliminate all electronic voting. A huge, easily corrupted, electronic barrier exists between the will of the voters and the results of an election. There should be no intermediate steps between the voter and the human counters of the vote. If democracy is not transparent it ain’t democracy
The Irish may have missed an opportunity to make money rather than facing up to big loss…
Here are Halderman, of Michigan and Feldman, of Princeton:
A great story,…
PAC-MAN on the Sequoia AVC-Edge DRE voting machine
https://jhalderm.com/pacman/
…Sequoia AVC Edge…Where the machine come from…What’s inside the AVC Edge? [486 SLE processor and 32 MB of RAM””similar specs to a 20-year-old PC.]…Wouldn’t seals expose any tampering? [no]…How did you reprogram the machine? [not hard]Why PAC-MAN?
In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the iconic arcade game, we reprogrammed the AVC Edge to run Pac-Man. …We could have reprogrammed it to steal votes, but that’s been done before, and Pac-Man is more fun!
I would hope the Irish Government is prescient enough to hold onto a sizable random sample so that the logic system and database can be publicly analyzed at a later date.
So many seemingly unpopular votes have been tabulated on machines such as these and encoded into law in direct conflict with polling and the interests of voters worldwide that it bears witness to the belief that these machines are not only unreliable, but designed specifically to be unreliable…in predictable fashion.
Please, Ireland. Take some of these apart and forensically analyze them.
Don’t worry Dan, the same NEDAP voting machines were brought over here and someone tried to sell them as “Libertyvote.” I am sure some are still around somewhere.
I observed the exam when Libertyvote tried to get certified in Pennyslvania. They had their machine hooked up to a car battery during the test. I kid you not.
Libertyvote flunked the part of the test involving the “Pennsylvania method” of straight party voting. The PA Dept. of State sent them home to reprogram and they never came back. So no county in PA ever used Libertyvote machines.
Bravo Ireland! Missourians for Honest Elections has been fighting to get rid of DREs in the state of Missouri since 2006. We have informed countless public officials over the years–including representatives of the Governor’s staff, the Secretary of State’s office, nearly every state legislator in Jefferson City , and local election officials–of the high risks involved in continuing to use these machines, as well as DRE problems that have occurred right here in the state.. We have managed to have two hearings on a bipartisan bill to outlaw DREs in the House Elections Committee and two in the equivalent committee in the Senate. But the bill never has made it to the floor in either chamber. The majority of the officials we’ve talked to say they share our concerns about these machines once we’ve had a chance to inform them of the serious security risks, and of the actual DRE mechanical failures we’ve experienced here. (For example, 25% of St. Louis County’s DREs had a technical problem that required tech assistance in the Nov. 2010 election –up 15% from Nov. 2008–including numerous instances of votes flipping from one candidate to another on the screen. ) However, despite their having been well educated by us on the issue, public officials in Missouri have not made it a priority. The machines are still in place here and will be used in November. Why? One cannot help thinking that there is more to the story than simple negligence.