Estonia’s Online Voting Would Solve A Lot Of Our Election Problems

 By alev Leetaru

As US voters went to the polls Tuesday, many encounteredthe myriad inevitable breakdowns of America’s obsolete voting technology. From machines running versions of Windows that were discontinued half a decade ago to malfunctioning scanners and even missing power cords, not to mention lines snaking around the block, voting in America today can be a disaster. It doesn’t have to be this way and Estonia’s electronic voting system offers a vision of what voting of the future will look like.

Despite its small size, Estonia has become a global model of the power of a fully digital government to serve its citizens. While the US helped usher in the modern web and brought the world everything from search engines to social networks, it has focused nearly exclusively on commercializing the web as a consumer product. It was Estonia that pioneered how to harness the web for governance.

Estonia offers a truly remarkable story of what is possible when a Silicon Valley mindset is applied to reimagining how governments can serve their citizens. Instead of focusing a nation’s engineers on how to get their fast food faster or a luxury chauffeur on demand or an internet connected organic juicer, Estonia shows what happens when you instead focus on how to use the digital world to power a democracy. In Estonia it takes just a few mouse clicks and less than five minutes to file one’s taxes, about the time it takes to place an online shopping order here in the US.

For all the talk in the US over the past decade of revolutionizing our governmental functions through technology, the reality has been disappointing, to put it mildly.

Instead, in Estonia, nearly every interaction an Estonian citizen has with their government can be conducted online today, including voting. Estonia’s online voting, called “i-Voting” is used today by more than 30% of its citizens. In 2005 the country became the first in the world to hold national elections using online voting, following two years later with the first online parliamentary election voting.

In Estonia’s system citizens can vote from the comfort of their own homes, including from abroad while traveling. Unlike the electronic voting machines used in the US, Estonia’s system is completely web-based, meaning voters use their own computers. Each citizen’s unique cryptographic identity, stored on their smart identity card, certifies their vote.

Imagine in the US, if instead of waiting an hour at a polling station for a half-broken machine using software that was discontinued half a decade ago, you could just pull up your web browser and vote from home. This would be especially powerful for the nation’s rural voters and those without easy transportation to their assigned polling station.

Estonia’s model even takes into account concerns over vote buying and coercion. Voters are permitted to vote as many times as they like during the assigned voting period, with only the most recent vote counting. While multiple voting is rare, it allows voters to change their minds as new information emerges, unlike in the US where advance voting is fixed in time, even if new information about a candidate emerges the day before the election.

In the US once you cast your vote it is out of your hands and you must blindly trust that election officials do not lose, discard or discount your voice. As voters discovered with Florida’s “hanging chads,” even if you cast your vote it may not ultimately be counted and you’ll have no idea it was your vote that was thrown away.

Estonia solves this problem by allowing citizens to vote from their computer and separately log into the electoral website using their smartphone to verify that their vote was received and correctly recorded for the proper candidates. This adds an additional level of security not found in traditional electronic voting systems. If an attacker manages to place malware on electronic voting systems in the US, they can silently change votes without the voter being aware. In Estonia’s system your smartphone is connected directly to the central electoral database showing you the actual vote that was recorded for you. This means that even if the computer from which you cast your vote has been secretly infected or hacked with software designed to alter your vote, you can verify that your vote was received correctly by the government.

For those who don’t wish to use digital voting, traditional paper voting is still fully available.

If voting in the US no longer required a physical trip to a polling station or requesting and mailing a paper ballot, imagine how much easier it would be to mobilize the legions of voters who have become accustomed to conducting their entire lives online. From born-digital millennials who prefer online services on through those who don’t have easy transportation to a polling station, offering web-based voting could dramatically reduce barriers to having our voices heard. In Estonia, the percent of voters over age 55 casting their local election votes online has nearly doubled from 15% to 27%.

With online voting, all votes are stored and tallied centrally, meaning that once polls close the results can be announced rapidly and without the uncertainty and weeks-long recounts of paper ballots.

Putting this all together, for more than a decade Estonia has proven the effortlessness and security of online voting, offering a model for the world that perhaps one day the US may embrace. Just imagine what the American government of the future might look like if the engineers that brought us the modern web spent a little less time creating web-connected organic juicers and a bit more time redesigning our obsolete paper-obsessed bureaucracy. Estonia offers us a vision of this incredible future.

Based in Washington, DC, I founded my first internet startup the year after the Mosaic web browser debuted, while still in eighth grade, and have spent the last 20 years working to reimagine how we use data to understand the world around us at scales and in ways never before.

Resourse: Forbes

Staying grounded as key to success for eAgronom

For many years, agriculture has had a sustainability problem. World food production is declining and much of it can be traced to individual farms. To start with, a small hold farmer has its usual adversities like pests, weeds, drought and bad weather, and crop resiliency. He also has to think about the regular maintenance work in the farm – quality check, harvesting, logistics, accounting and inventory, and so much more. And we are not talking about any employees here yet.

Farming is a difficult job on its own, running a farm business is another story. So imagine the stress a farmer has to go through from the start of planting season to harvesting to his produce reaching the market and getting the return of investment after all overhead costs.

Robin Saluoks and Stenver Jerkku, founders of agritech company eAgronom, thought of a way to relieve farmers from the burden of navigating through peaks and troughs of running a business and let them focus on what’s really important – the farming.

We talked with Robin and Stenver how their disruptive service is attracting the world’s attention and changing the landscape of the agriculture sector.

What does winning Young Entrepreneur of the Year mean to you as co-founder, to your organization, to your clients and partners?

RS: Being a young Entrepreneur of the Year tells to eAgronom people that the public also feels that we are on the right way. It makes us happy of course, but it doesn’t change who we are. My father is a farmer, our customers are farmers and most of our investors are farmers, therefore, we have only one mantra – Farmer First! This is who we are and this is who we will be in the future.

SJ: When we got the award, we were all surprised. Just a week before me and Robin discussed who it should be – and we were sure it’s going to be Kaarel from Veriff. He deserves it and I hope he will get it next year! However, receiving the award ourselves brought a lot of attention and reinforced an already strong belief in the company. eAgronom has already expanded rapidly, raised a total of 3M euros over 2 years and attracted some of the most talented people globally. It is a big symbol for our strong team and all the hard work they put into the company. I speak for everybody when I say that I’m proud to be part of this team and glad we are changing the world together!

What was the inspiration behind founding eAgronom?

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RS: eAgronom started out from me building a tool that would help my father to spend more time with family. Once I met my partner in crime – the COO and Founder of eAgronom – Mr Stenver Jerkku, we understood that eAgronom is way bigger than our story. It is world-changing journey that has a goal to unite all the farmers in the world. We believe that by helping farmers to achieve their financial goals, we will achieve a cleaner environment and a healthier world. This is a huge inspiration for us since eAgronom farmers are already providing food to millions of people.

SJ: Most of us joined eAgronom because farmers are the foundation of our society – we wanted to make farmers happier, richer and letting them spend more time with their families. Through farmers, we want to make the world a cleaner place and our food healthier.

eAgronom was started when Robin showed me his father’s farm and many other farms. Farms these days are real businesses with real business problems. However, they lack the tools to focus on optimizing their business processes and need to spend a lot of time gathering data or on other low-value activities. This means they often need to outsource a lot of their knowledge. One of the things they outsource is agronomical information – fertilizer and chemical salespeople. The salespeople salaries are directly connected to how much fertilizers and chemicals they sell, so obviously they push the farmer towards the maximum amount of yield and revenue, not the maximum amount of profit. This cuts into farmers profit margins and pollutes our environment.

We saw that this is our chance to truly have a global and positive impact on the whole world by helping farmers.

Can you tell us more about your services?

RS: We bring more time and money to farmers. eAgronom is a place where farmer looks in the morning, day and evening to get information that is important for decision making. This is just the beginning since we will become the everything store in farming.

SJ: During the winter the farmer plans for the next year – his crops, logistics, financials, fertilizers, chemicals, etc. We help the farmer with all of those tasks. During the summer the farmer works on the field and manages the employees. We help with task and employee management through a mobile phone, inventory tracking and keeping tabs on the situation.

After the season, the farmer can compare his fields side-by-side and analyze his fields – find out why one field was better than another. All the government reports which take up to a month each year are only 1 click away.

One of your buzzwords is farmer-friendly, what does it mean and what is the effect of having a farmer-friendly solution to farmers?

RS: Our first person after founders were designer and awesome decision since the average age of our user is over 50 years. These are smart guys, but they prefer to be on nature rather than sit behind the computer. Therefore we try to map habits that they already have and bring them to the digital world. I remember watching my grandfather giving orders to tractor operators while pointing on the map. My father is doing it similarly but on the tablet and workers receive tasks to their smartphones.

SJ: We are in every way by farmers for farmers. This starts with our founder, Robin, who has been raised in a farm his whole life.

Our company culture also revolves around farmers – developers and analysts travel and visit the farmers to conduct research before developing anything. We had an entire developer team visiting Polish farmers just 2 months ago to truly understand what and how the customers want to use the software features. We don’t sit in the office and think of ways to make farmers life better. We talk to them. Sales and CS always put the farmers, their calls and questions before any other tasks in their day-to-day work. A meeting can always wait if a customer is in trouble!

We are also financed by farmers – our own customers, Estonian farmers, invested 500K to eAgronom to help with our product development and expansion.

In this day and age, why do you think your company matters in our society?

RS: eAgronom customers provide food to millions of people already. This number grows exponentially each year and therefor every decision that our development team does is affecting the health of the society. At the same time, the hectares that we manage to grow exponentially as well. You can think about soil as a CO2 bank and our customers are growing it. Increasing carbon level in the soil is one of the most important KPIs for our customers since it increases soil quality and yield in a natural way without paying big money to chemical companies.

SJ: eAgronom has a chance to truly impact the world in a positive way. By helping farmers make data-driven decisions, we make one of the hardest and oldest job on earth easier, more profitable and through farmers help the world become a cleaner place.

We have already proven how we have saved farmers tens to hundreds of thousands of euros a year and had a direct positive impact on the environment.

Can you name some challenges that your startup is facing? And how do you plan to address them?

RS: I believe that the biggest challenge for every company is to staying true their focus and culture. We are not focusing on entire farming but only grain farming right now. This has allowed us to grow exponentially with that small costs. At the same time, we are constantly reminding us who we are since we believe it will bring us good results in the future. Staying really true these values is the biggest challenge every company faces.

SJ: Sales and expansion – farming is a very traditional and conservative industry. In addition, every country we enter has its own culture and language. We need to adapt to every country we enter to ensure a swift market acquisition. In order to achieve that, our own founder and CEO – Robin Saluoks – personally moved to Poland to jump-start the country expansion. He plans to bunny-hop the major markets until we have nailed the expansion plan to be like a sharp spear and we can put it to full auto-pilot.

What are your future plans?

RS: eAgronom will become everything store in farming. We continue uniting farmers with awesome speed and stay true to our main value – Farmer First. Farming will be a most stable business sector in the future that is very little influenced by weather (this is where most people would probably disagree with me).

SJ: First, we plan to take Baltics, Poland and Czech. Then we will take Europe. Then we will take North America and Russian speaking countries. Finally, we will take the world!

All the while we will continue improving our platform and eventually want to give agronomical suggestions that are generated by AI to help farmers make better decisions and have a direct positive impact on our food and soil sustainability.

We recently heard the news that you acquired another set of funding, can you tell us more about it and how does it help further your cause?

RS: We wanted to have the perfect set of investors during this 1M EUR round and we got it – international VC funds, foreign market local VC funds and builders of Pipedrive which is one of the most successful SaaS companies. Each party is useful for reaching our next goals – connect farmers fast + raise A round – and at the same time supports our strategy for becoming everything-store in farming. People in eAgronom, existing investors and new investors understand that eAgronom will save 10B euros for farmers yearly by the end of 2023.

Resource: e-estonia

E-Residency’s Arnaud Castaignet On How To Start An EU-based Company From Anywhere In The World With €280

By DANA RUDENKO

Residency has been dubbed “Estonia’s gift to the world” and it’s easy to see why. Since 2014 entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world have a chance to become e-residents, which allows them to register an EU-based company and run it completely online, as well as access Estonian government digital services. With over 35,000 e-residents registered already, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Asia’s richest person Mukesh Ambani, Estonia is set to become not just the land of unicorns* but also the first truly digital nation.

We spoke to Arnaud Castaignet, the Head of Public Relations at e-Residency, about the who can become an e-resident and why being involved in the local community is integral to being a true entrepreneur.

Read the interview below or watch the full interview at the end of the article.

Interviewer: Hi, Arnaud. You are here at IT Arena Lviv representing e-Residency. It’s a project by the Estonian government aimed at helping startups grow, is that right?

Arnaud Castaignet: Exactly! We actually help startups who are not in Estonia to become Estonian startups. So basically e-Residency is a program offered by the government of Estonia since December 2014, with government-issued ID cards available to anyone from anywhere in the world to become an e-resident and access Estonian e-services. From the startup point of view the most important thing about e-residency is the ability to create, manage and run your company fully online from anywhere in the world without ever even having to come to Estonia.

I: For those startups, are there any restrictions age-wise or industry-wise?

AC: No, there are no restrictions. So far we’ve attracted 35,000 e-residents coming from 157 countries around the world. Most of the e-residents want to become an e-resident because they want access to the open markets, they want to be able to manage a company fully online and at a low cost, they want to be able to access business banking services. We open access to all of the tools needed to make a business grow.

“Be very integrated in the local business and startup community. It’s hard to be an entrepreneur and be totally isolated.”

I: When an entrepreneur or a startup wants to become an e-resident, where should they go, what should they do?

AC: The first thing to do is to go to our website https://e-resident.gov.ee/. There you will need to fill in an application form. It’s actually very simple and very fast – we’re only going to ask you for a copy of your passport and your motivations for applying. You’ll then need to pass a background check by the Ministry of the Interior, because of course we don’t want people involved in any criminal activity to become an e-resident. Once you receive an approval on your application, you need to go to the nearest Estonian embassy to pick up your ID card and you’ll be able to access the services!

I: As a representative of e-Residency you deal a lot with young startups and entrepreneurs. What’s your #1 advice for someone who may still be considering starting a business?

AC: The main advice is to be very integrated in the local business and startup community, because most new ideas and most of the new partnerships you get are by engaging and discussing them with others who have the same experiences or are actually more experienced. That is why at e-Residency we wanted to have a country manager to be fully involved in the local community, coworking spaces, incubators, etc.

It’s very important to have partners. It’s hard to be an entrepreneur and be totally isolated. you need to have advisers, you need to have new partnerships, you need to find synergies with other people who go through the same experiences. This advice works for startups, but also us as a governmental program – we also try to be very integrated in the local community.

“It only costs €100 to become an e-resident and then €180 to register your company in Estonia. So we see a lot of interest coming from the whole I.T. community.”

I: You’ve had a walk around IT Arena Lviv, you’ve seen what Ukraine has to offer in terms of startups. Is there a lot of potential in countries like these?

AC: Definitely. At E-Residency Ukraine is the biggest community. We have 2600 Ukrainians who became e-residents because for entrepreneurs from countries like this it’s a very convenient and common solution to creating a startup.

It only costs €100 to become an e-resident and then €180 to register your company in Estonia. So we see a lot of interest coming from the whole I.T. community. There are so many educated people who just want to have better access to opportunities worldwide. That’s why for a lot of them e-Residency is a very convenient solution.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Resource: SnoviLabs