Eight years after they were variously praised and blamed for handing victory to George Bush, the voting machines at the centre of America’s 2000 election controversy are making a comeback as political souvenirs.

The notorious Votomatics that put Palm Beach County in Florida in the global spotlight during the recount battle between Mr Bush and his Democratic rival Al Gore have become hot collecters’ items.

Jim Dobyns, who sells the laptop-sized machines for $75 (£45) from his home in St Petersburg, Florida, says that 90 per cent of his buyers are Democrats, perhaps still smarting at the role they played in Mr Gore’s defeat.

“I guess they like having the ‘villain’ in their living room or office so that they can point at it and say: ‘That’s the culprit’,” he said. “But Republicans feel kind of friendly towards these things. One buyer described it as ‘the machine that saved America’.”

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The 2000 race for the White House came down to Florida’s votes and, in particular, to a recount in Palm Beach County. There, officials struggled to interpret many voters’ intentions because the Votomatics – which required people to punch a hole beside the name of their favoured candidate – had failed to slice through the paper properly, leaving a dangling stub known as a hanging chad.

Mr Bush was declared the winner of Florida by 537 votes, and accordingly, President. As he headed for the White House, Palm Beach’s Votomatics were bound for the scrapheap.

Mr Dobyns, who works as a Republican consultant, discovered 1,200 of the machines being advertised for sale, bought them for $10 each and has been selling them as Christmas gifts, teaching aids for schools and prizes at political fundraisers. He rented some for use in the HBO television film Recount, a dramatisation of the election debacle starring Kevin Spacey.

Other Votomatics have ended up in presidential libraries and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which in 2001 declared them “part of the machinery of American democracy”.

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