March 5, 2007 at 14:52The world's first online election: report from Estonia
The agricultural Republic of Estonia with a population of one and a half million was considered quite backward during the Soviet era, and 15 years ago half of the inhabitants did not have telephones at all. After leaving the empire, the situation changed radically: Estonians covered almost the entire territory of the country with wireless access points, presented the world with Skype, and now they were the first on the planet to hold parliamentary elections on the Internet.
Wired magazine published an interesting report from the Estonian elections , which ended yesterday, March 4. Although polling stations were opened only on Sunday, on Wednesday 30,000 people cast their votes, that is, 3.5% of Estonian voters - all of them voted online. By the end of the week, the number of “online voters” will, of course, be much larger.
Tarvi Martens, the project manager for online elections, explains that the success of e-voting could be predicted by looking at the popularity of online banking in Estonia. In a Baltic country, most banking transactions are carried out via the Internet. If people trust the Internet for money, then they will trust their vote in the elections without any doubt.
The electronic voting system was first tested in local council elections in 2005. To vote via the Internet, a citizen had to use his personal identification smart card, which already acquired more than 1 million of the 1.3 million adult residents of Estonia. To generate a digital signature from your PC, you also need a special card reader, which is sold at $ 8 in Estonian stores. Many citizens have long bought such a device, because it gives access not only to the voting system, but also to many other services on the central state portal.
To vote, you need to insert the card into the reader, run the web voting program in IE (the Firefox browser is not fully supported, for Linux, the program must be installed on the computer manually, and updating ID certificates and other functions are not available), after which a list of parties and candidates appears on the screen. The whole process is well illustrated in the Jaanus1 photostream . The e-voting interface is objectively simpler than huge multi-sheet paper ballots. The voter's voice is sent in encrypted form to the voting server, where it is decrypted on Sunday, at a strictly defined time. Each vote can be traced and verified, so that the procedure is protected from outside interference (the audit was carried out by a reputable foreign auditor KPMG).
Now some countries are preparing to follow Estonia’s example and also introduce Internet voting technology. Similar experiments on a small number of voters have already taken place in the UK, France, Holland and other countries. By the way, in March 2007, full-fledged Internet elections in Hawaii will be held .
However, the technology of voting via the Internet causes concern among some experts who talk about the possibility of outside interference in the voting process. First of all, we are talking about typically computer vulnerabilities in the system (viruses, trojans, DDoS attacks on the voting server, etc.). Anyway, taking possession of someone else's smart card (and two PIN codes), theoretically, you can steal someone else's voice in the elections. However, the risk of such theft is low. But with a competent and transparent voting procedure, it is absolutely impossible to carry out mass rigging of the results. Many experts believe that electronic voting is much safer than manipulating paper ballots. As in theory, you need to correctly organize a process of expression of will protected from manipulation - in the articles by the links below.
Related links:
Alexander Militsky. "Impartiality Strategy." - Computerra Magazine
Alexander Militsky. "The conscious need for choice." - Magazine "Computerra"
Wired magazine published an interesting report from the Estonian elections , which ended yesterday, March 4. Although polling stations were opened only on Sunday, on Wednesday 30,000 people cast their votes, that is, 3.5% of Estonian voters - all of them voted online. By the end of the week, the number of “online voters” will, of course, be much larger.
Tarvi Martens, the project manager for online elections, explains that the success of e-voting could be predicted by looking at the popularity of online banking in Estonia. In a Baltic country, most banking transactions are carried out via the Internet. If people trust the Internet for money, then they will trust their vote in the elections without any doubt.
The electronic voting system was first tested in local council elections in 2005. To vote via the Internet, a citizen had to use his personal identification smart card, which already acquired more than 1 million of the 1.3 million adult residents of Estonia. To generate a digital signature from your PC, you also need a special card reader, which is sold at $ 8 in Estonian stores. Many citizens have long bought such a device, because it gives access not only to the voting system, but also to many other services on the central state portal.
To vote, you need to insert the card into the reader, run the web voting program in IE (the Firefox browser is not fully supported, for Linux, the program must be installed on the computer manually, and updating ID certificates and other functions are not available), after which a list of parties and candidates appears on the screen. The whole process is well illustrated in the Jaanus1 photostream . The e-voting interface is objectively simpler than huge multi-sheet paper ballots. The voter's voice is sent in encrypted form to the voting server, where it is decrypted on Sunday, at a strictly defined time. Each vote can be traced and verified, so that the procedure is protected from outside interference (the audit was carried out by a reputable foreign auditor KPMG).
Now some countries are preparing to follow Estonia’s example and also introduce Internet voting technology. Similar experiments on a small number of voters have already taken place in the UK, France, Holland and other countries. By the way, in March 2007, full-fledged Internet elections in Hawaii will be held .
However, the technology of voting via the Internet causes concern among some experts who talk about the possibility of outside interference in the voting process. First of all, we are talking about typically computer vulnerabilities in the system (viruses, trojans, DDoS attacks on the voting server, etc.). Anyway, taking possession of someone else's smart card (and two PIN codes), theoretically, you can steal someone else's voice in the elections. However, the risk of such theft is low. But with a competent and transparent voting procedure, it is absolutely impossible to carry out mass rigging of the results. Many experts believe that electronic voting is much safer than manipulating paper ballots. As in theory, you need to correctly organize a process of expression of will protected from manipulation - in the articles by the links below.
Related links:
Alexander Militsky. "Impartiality Strategy." - Computerra Magazine
Alexander Militsky. "The conscious need for choice." - Magazine "Computerra"