Ireland Gives Up On E-Voting

Just too expensive:

Ireland has already put about $67 million into building out its e-voting infrastructure, but the country has apparently decided that it would be even more expensive to keep going with the system than it would be to just scrap it altogether.

In a statement, Ireland's Environment Minister John Gormely blamed the decision partly on the economic crisis, which has had an impact of nearly Icelandic proportions on the country's real estate market and banking system.

...Ireland's decision that it can't bear the continued costs of e-voting is merely the latest in an ongoing string of such decisions, in which states like Ohio and Florida have said that it's just too expensive to limp along with what is, in essence, a failed, poorly planned, large-scale IT infrastructure deployment. Few governments that scrap their existing e-voting systems go all the way back to paper like Ireland, though. In the case of Florida, for instance, the state moved totally to optical scan machines (and then it still managed to screw up an election).