Here’s a delicious meal of schadenfreude, as the UK’s far-left Guardian newspaper is forced to admit that their plan to influence the US election has backfired. Big time. Guardian calls it quits in Clark County fiasco.

The Guardian yesterday ran up the white flag and called a halt to “Operation Clark County”, the newspaper’s ambitious scheme to recruit thousands of readers to persuade American voters in a swing state to kick out President George W Bush in next month’s election.

The cancellation of the project came 24 hours after the first of some 14,000 letters from Guardian readers began arriving in Clark County. The missives led to widespread complaints about foreign interference in a US election.

It also prompted a surge of indignant local voters calling the county’s Republican party offering to volunteer for Mr Bush.

The paper said it had closed the website where readers collected an address to write to and had abandoned plans to take four “winners” to visit voters in Clark County. Instead, the group would be taken to the “more tranquil” area of Washington.

Albert Scardino, the paper’s executive editor for news, simultaneously denied and conceded that an early halt had been called to the project. “It is roaringly, successfully completed. It has been an overwhelming triumph,” he said.

He then acknowledged that no more addresses were being distributed, blaming attacks on The Guardian website by Right-wing hackers.

“If we had not had the technical problem of the assault we would have completed the distribution of names in orderly fashion,” he said. “We were able to give fewer addresses [of voters in Clark County] than we hoped. There were 14,000 names and addresses sent out. We would like to have made it possible to reach another 42,000 people.”

The scheme seemed to backfired from the start as the reactions of the first recipients varied from indifference to anger and even alarm. …

There had been mounting evidence that urging foreigners to send anti-Bush letters to Clark County - an isolated slice of the rural mid-West - was only hurting Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate.

One senior local politician, speaking off the record to avoid offending his neighbours, said: “They picked the wrong county for many reasons. One is, we’re very parochial. When people talk about The Guardian of London, they think you mean London, Ohio, which is in the next-door county. Another is, we have some issues with literacy round here.”