Estonian electronic voting publications

October 28, 2006

Estonia had Internet-based electronic voting in 2005 municipal elections, and will have them again in spring 2007 in the national parliament elections. While various e-voting pilots have been carried out elsewhere especially on the local and municipal level, the national e-voting election is definitely a "world's first".

Right after the municipal e-voting, there was not really too much material available in English on what this is about and how everything works legally and technically. So just this week there was an e-voting conference organized by eGovernance Academy and I took another look at what's available online. It's great to see a lot has been reported, translated and put online after the municipal elections, reporting on specific experiences as well as the wider context. See below for references.

It may sound a bit elitist, but the rest of the world, especially in the U.S., seems to be getting the whole "e-voting" thing horribly wrong. While they shun at attempts of leveraging the Internet and electronic identity, in their own elections at voting stations they have often disbanded paper ballots in favour of electronic voting machines with poor security track records. There is this talk about "paper audit trail" and a lot of papers are produced about how to determine if the machines have been tampered with or not. And much of the discussion is politically and commercially biased. I just found that Avi Rubin, a U.S. expert on the matter, has a blog where he documents what's happening in this field.

I find the Estonian system to be comprehensible, elegant and user-friendly. E-voting refers only to the Internet-based act. Traditional act of voting at the stations, including voter roster and vote casting, remains entirely paper-based. Internet-based voting is used only during the pre-election period. If something goes wrong with e-voting, there is always the possibility to cancel the whole thing and have e-voters re-vote with a paper ballot (which they can do nevertheless, and the paper ballot then prevails, to guarantee security and confidentiality of the vote). For more on how it works, the reports below provide a great reference.

I e-voted in 2005, as did my mother and grandma. I did it just to see how it goes, and it was smooth. For grandma, we had more practical reasons since she has trouble getting around and mostly stays in the house. The constituency where she should have voted, in her native village, was hundreds of kilometers away and it would have been a great hassle to take her there. But now we could do it from the convenience of our home and everything worked just fine.

On the rationale of e-voting, it is a great example of how the government makes it easier for its people to interact with it regardless of where they are. I'm half-expat, often staying away from Estonia for extended periods of time. I can still be part of the "culture space", even if I'm physically out of the country. All major newspapers have pretty readable online editions. The national television archives its daily news online, often as quickly as just an hour after the live broadcast. And now I can vote too. The studies after 2005 e-vote indicate that most people chose to e-vote simply because they found it more convenient than the traditional method, and that's what it should really be all about.

Many challenges remain in bringing the e-vote closer to all groups of the Estonian public and educating the international community about what we're up to. But as it stands, the future doesn't look too bad. I'll try to cover the more interesting bits also here with the "e-voting" tag (link to RSS feed of posts tagged "e-voting").

Estonian electronic voting publications

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