THE GOVERNMENT’S ILL-FATED e-voting machines are set to be put up for final sale this week, it is reported today.

The Sunday Times reports that Fine Gael minister Phil Hogan, whose Department of the Environment was responsible for the project under the guidance of previous ministers Noel Dempsey and Martin Cullen, has instructed the taskforce in charge of it to prepare a tender for the sale of the units.

The 7,504 units – the majority of which were never used – have been in storage since their purchase, with a fraction of them used in the 2002 general election on a trial basis in Meath, Dublin West and Dublin North.

While others have been used in classrooms around the country, many have never been used at all – with the experiment dropped after a report from the Commission on Electronic Voting criticised the omission of a backup paper trail from the machines’ mechanisms.

“This has been a very wasteful use of taxpayers’ money by my predecessors,” Hogan told today’s Sunday Times, saying he expected to receive a recommendation from the taskforce on how to best dispose of the machines before the end of the month.

Previous attempts to find a buyer for the machines were unsuccessful, with the Department saying that no formal offers to purchase them had materialised from the 20-or-so submissions it had received.

The machines cost €51m to buy in 2002, with tens of millions more spent storing the machines at commercial facilities since then.

Will 7,000 e-voting machines become traffic cones? >