Present Tense Shane HegartyWe'll get at the Estonian general election in a moment, but be patient. First we'll talk about Richard and Judy. It has been revealed that viewers of their Channel 4 show were encouraged to call in at £1 a pop and apply for the daily quiz You Say, We Pay, even though the entrants had been picked in the first few minutes of the show.
The story has gathered momentum. Not only has it emerged that the show received complaints about this as early as 2004, but several other programmes have similarly been collared this week.
First, it was discovered that BBC1's "live" show Saturday Morning Kitchen wasn't always live at all. Instead, the host was asking people to ring in for a chance to appear on the next week's show, except that they'd then film "next week's show" only a few hours later. It was costing 25p a call for those fruitlessly hoping to break fennel bread with a celebrity.
Then came the announcement that 1.3 million of the votes cast during last year's X-Factor final on ITV were overcharged. Anyone who pressed the red button on their digital set was charged 15p more than they should have been.
Adding up to almost £200,000 (€297,000), it's a sum even Simon Cowell couldn't be sniffy about.
ITV was already under investigation for its late-night quizzes in which the odds of getting through are only marginally less than those of Peter O'Toole ever winning an Oscar for best actor. Even then, the answers are so disconnected from the questions that you wonder if David Lynch sets them. Among viewers' complaints was how two answers to the question "what items might be found in a woman's handbag?" were "balaclava" and "rawl plugs".
This episode is increasingly looking like a modern equivalent of the 1950s quiz show scandals in the US. However, it also offers further anecdotes to the story of how technology has failed to live up to its promise of fairness - or at least proof of how easily people can corrupt it.
These phone-in phonies join the already well-developed reputation that online polls have for being rigged. The Irish have long proven particularly skilled at distorting these polls for comic effect. As far back as 1999, cult Irish footballer Ronnie O'Brien pipped Martin Luther King, Ghandi and John F Kennedy in the online race to become Time magazine's Person of the Century.
All of which will make tomorrow's election in Estonia worth watching closely, because if Ronnie O'Brien or Paris Hilton is swept into power we'll know that the country's experiment in online voting has gone a bit awry.
This will be the first national parliamentary election in which people will be able to vote over the internet. Only 20,000-40,000 of the one million-strong electorate are likely to vote online, but it's fascinating to see Estonia's confidence in the process. The Estonian system is aided by the fact that the population already carries national ID cards. Tomorrow they will place this into a card reader attached to a computer, with two passwords required, in order to vote securely. It has a successful precedent, as recent local elections allowed online voting. Meanwhile, the process was tested out last week, when online voters were asked to pick their "king of the forest" from a choice of 10 animals. No major problems emerged, although the squirrel now holds the balance of power in a shaky woodland coalition.
Estonia trusts e-voting in a way no longer shared by other countries to its west. There was a brief point early in the life of the internet when it seemed as if it might offer a new democratic weapon, when it was forecast that votes could be cast securely online, so bringing in an era of deeper public participation in the democratic process. But while there are still some advocating a day when people can vote from home or the supermarket or the middle of the ocean, that day is moving further away.
In the US, despite some experiments, the perceived risk of coercion and of sabotage ruled out a planned role for online voting by overseas military in the 2004 presidential election. Despite successful English local elections in which votes were cast by text message, the internet and TV, there are no plans to roll it out nationally. And in Ireland, Martin Cullen's one-armed bandits are rusting away in storage, and the company that supplied them to us has gone into voluntary liquidation, while the suspicion of e-voting of any kind has become firmly embedded among the population.
The acceptance of online voting will not happen until it lives up to the expectation of perfection. But every dodgy phone-in quiz, internet poll, unused e-voting machine and hanging chad does its bit in convincing the electorate that it's best to stick with the many imperfections of voting with pen and paper.
And yet, the ideal of being able to vote from home still appeals. It might be drowning in the cynicism, but it is still there.
Which is why Estonia's brave steps towards it should be watched carefully. Although if the country wakes up to find Richard and Judy as president, it'll know that wires have been well and truly crossed.