Ireland paid €51m for e-voting machines, used them once, then sold them for €70,000

In 2000 Ireland's environment department set out to modernise elections with an electronic voting and counting system. A tender returned prices from €25.4m to €60.9m, and the state signed with the Nedap Powervote consortium at €33.4m. Six test machines arrived in August 2001; 600 more were ordered that November for a three-constituency pilot at the 2002 general election. In March 2003, before any independent certification, the department ordered a further 6,000 machines to roll the system out nationwide.

The Comptroller and Auditor General's 2003 audit found the state had committed to the nationwide purchase while key questions remained open. A statutory Commission on Electronic Voting was set up to report on secrecy and accuracy; its interim report of May 2004 could not endorse the Nedap Powervote system for the June 2004 elections. The audit also flagged avoidable costs: late modifications ran to about €2,300 per machine against €615 if done before delivery - roughly €680,000 wasted. In the end 6,315 machines were bought.

The machines were used exactly once, in Dublin North, Dublin West and Meath in 2002, plus a referendum. In April 2009 Environment Minister John Gormley announced the system would be scrapped, putting its cost at least €51m excluding storage. Storage ran to about €4m. In 2012 minister Phil Hogan signed a contract letting Tullamore-based KMK Metals Recycling take all 7,500 machines, paying the state just over €70,000 - and called the whole affair a 'sorry episode'.

€51m spent on machines, excluding about €4m of storage; used in one general election and one referendum; sold in 2012 for just over €70,000

Ireland ordered the nationwide fleet in March 2003 before certification: the independent commission's first report came only in May 2004, and it declined to endorse the system.

The 2002 pilot covered only a few hundred machines, yet the department read it as proof the countrywide rollout should proceed.

Contract sequencing punished the state: modifying delivered machines cost about €2,300 each versus €615 at the factory, an avoidable €680,000.

Public doubts about secrecy and accuracy were never answered; once voters stuck with pencil and paper, the machines had no electoral use to justify keeping them.

Buy one, test it, certify it - then buy the fleet. Capital committed before certification turns a vendor's promise into the state's liability, and in elections lost confidence never comes back.

The machines sat in storage for years at growing cost until the 2012 recycling contract. In December 2018 the government confirmed there was no prospect of e-voting machines returning in the short, medium or long term, noting citizens had no urge to depart from the pencil and the ballot paper.