The Guardian won’t be asking readers to send letters to US voters anymore.

Between Guardian sites getting hacked and the anger of US voters and widespread complaints, the project has been halted.

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.

What bothers me is that the paper was able to purchase Ohio’s Clark County election roll.

“Good-humoured” headlines in the local newspaper, the Springfield News-Sun have included “Butt Out Brits, voters say” and “Trashing letter campaign” - a reference to the fact that the first woman to receive a letter from a Guardian reader, Beverly Coale, threw it away, fearing it was from a terrorist.

Karen Henschen, a member of the executive committee of the Clark County Democratic party, said scrapping the project was “probably the best thing they could do”.

The end of the scheme comes as a relief to Linda Rosicka, the director of the Clark County board of elections, who has been fielding dozens of interview requests from the world’s media.

Yet there is one last Guardian letter Mrs Rosicka would still like to see - one containing a cheque for $25 (about £13), which the newspaper still owes her for its purchase of the county’s electoral roll.

“I was nice and made the file available, because their reporter said he was right on deadline,” she said. “They said the cheque is in the mail. As of this morning, it still hasn’t arrived, and it’s been more than a week.”

The Guardian says their idea was successful, albeit the backlash somewhat unconsidered.

Then came the backlash. We had expected it, of course. Fox-viewing America was never going to embrace our modest sortie into US politics and we knew full well that any individual voter might take exception to the idea of a foreigner writing to offer some advice on how they should vote - our website explicitly urged participants to “imagine how you would feel if you received a letter from an American urging you to vote for Tony Blair … or Michael Howard.” But you couldn’t fail to be a little shocked by the volume and pitch of the invective directed our way. Most of it was coordinated by a handful of resourceful bloggers - the ringleader of whom is fittingly published on a site called “spleenville” - and much of it was eye-wateringly unpleasant.