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
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