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Estonian Internet Voting Called a Success
composer314 writes "The Associated Press is reporting that the small European nation of Estonia has conducted large-scale voting over the Internet. From the article: "Last week, Estonia became the first country in the world to hold an election allowing voters nationwide to cast ballots over the internet. Fewer than 10,000 people, or 1 percent of registered voters, participated online in elections for mayors and city councils across the country, but officials hailed the experiment as a success." The system is built on Linux." I guess it works well when the Internet is considered a human right.
Such a success, we got back twice as many votes as our population! We had no idea it would work so well!
Call me a geographically challenged USA-ian, but I think this must be a hoax.
If you read the Dilbert cartoon, Estonia is the fake country with the bearded people
And if it were real, I'm sure I would have heard of it buy now since all the real countries have obvious names like England, Mexico, Canada, France, etc. etc.
I actually wonder about some of those -stan prefixed former Russian countries...do they exist?
I wonder what would have had to happen for it to be considered a failure.
An unprecedented write-in vote by internet users sends Kevin Mitnick to the Whitehouse.
Were that to happen in the United States we'd get 500 million votes for Senator Linus Torvalds..
Perhaps it displayed a snappy song-and-dance number.
"Hey, we're Estonia,
We like macaronia,
And it's time to voooote!"
That would be a success of a kind.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
To cast an online ballot, voters need a special ID card, a $24 device that reads the card and a computer with Internet access. About 80 percent of Estonian voters have the ID cards, which have been used since 2002 for online access to bank accounts and tax records.
/adjusts tin-foil hat
Election committee officials said the ID card system had proved effective and reliable and dismissed any security concerns with using it for the online ballot.
Information is sparse, but does anyone know if votes were linked to who voted for what? And what kind of proof can we find that voting a particular way won't involve retaliation...? I'd like this in the USA, but I'm unsure
Are you saying that only 49% of the population COULD have voted at all in the election? If so you're severly misinformed. 1% isn't the total number of people who voted, but the total number of people who voted online.
Ever heard of the absentee ballot?
. . . downplayed reports of a test round of balloting in which tabulations resulted in George W. Bush as the winner of the election for Prime Minister of Estonia.
Voting over the internet, or any kind of distance voting for that matter, violates a very basic premise of the democratic process : that each vote is guaranteed to belong to the one in the name of whom it is cast. There is no guarantee with remote voting that the voter has not sold her vote, or that no pressure has been exercised on her.
Voting should consist in having people go completely alone in isolated booths. A vote on a country's government is not an internet poll.
Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, on hearing of the news about Estonia's good fortune utilizing Linux for their successful voting, purchased the country. The voting is now nullified with the purchase, however all citizens who voted will be given discount coupons on purchases of any Microsoft product.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
I see this and future use of internet voting as steps toward direct democracy. I predict that within this century, some countries will use direct democracy as the legislative body on the local and regional level. Direct Democracy is where citizens can directly propose and vote on legislation, making representatives redundant.
When democracy was first proposed, it was long argued by the elite that peasants were not smart enough to rule themselves; they needed kings to keep society from collapsing. Even the first democracies were collections of wealthy land-owning males -- almost 90% of the population, including women, slaves, and peasants, were not enfranchised into the government. Well, those naysayers were wrong, and commoners are perfectly capable of running representational democracies.
The thing is, representatives are a compromise anyways. In days when farmers worked 14 hour days 6 days a week, no one had the time to travel meet up with everyone else to discuss politics. The American legal system is based on how long it takes a person travelling on horseback to transmit information.
Now with the advent of the internet and other communication technologies, representatives are redundant. We could propose and vote on laws ourselves, over the internet. Problems such as authentication and verification have been solved in various communication systems. As soon as the general public gets the hang of internet discussions, people will see direct democracy as a reasonable alternative to representational democracy. This could happen within a generation or two.
Of course, current politicians will resist direct democracy, because it puts them out of their incredibly powerful positions.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"It was flawless", the Chief Election Commissioner said, and in apparent attempt to gloat over his critics, who were loudly warning of problems, he added: "And it proves that contrary to what those feeble Doomsayers were saying, we should not fear new technology, we should embrace it because it is new, shiny and made in America!".
In related news, some confusion persists of the proper procedure of swearing the new Estonian President, Barney "The Pink" Dinosaur, and his vice-president Wet Noodle, both of the party "All Your Base Belong To Us". Additional complications for the traditionalists is the suprising new discoverery at the polls that apparently most Estonians turned out to be of the Jedi religion.
The following are actual countries ending in -stan Former members of the USSR: - Kazakhstan - Uzbekistan - Turkmenistan - Tajikistan - Kyrgyzstan Not members of the USSR: - Afghanistan (but almost!) - Pakistan "-stan" is a suffix in Farsi and Sanskrit meaning "home" or "place of". For a full list of national, regional, and ficticious -stans, see -stan article on wikipedia.
Although they don't suggest it, perhaps that 1% have mobility impairments and have never voted before, but now they get a chance. Obviously that's the best case scenario, but it seems a little ridiculous that there haven't been more efforts to expand the possibilities of voting. And scoffing at 1%? How many people do absentee votes in the U.S. (or any democratic country)? I would guess it's not more than 10%. And yet, for many, it's the only way they can vote. And absentee voting has been around for years, so I think 1% is not fantastic, but it's a good start.
Here in America, that'd be a significan percentage of the people who bother to vote at all.
Actually, it'd probably be pretty neat if people could access a website with their cell phones to vote. Send a huge SMS message wave, and see all those kids actually bother to vote.
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From the article, and the summary... "Fewer than 10,000 people, or 1 percent of registered voters, participated *online* in elections for mayors and city councils across the country" (stars added by me)
The vote wasn't exclusively online. Everyone else who voted did it the normal way- this just expands the options for casting your vote.
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
Estonia was part of the Russian empire until 1918, it was independent from 1918 to 1940 when it was forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union, all along it has been an ethnically distinct region. Estonia had only been part of Russia for 200 years prior to 1710 it had been part of either Denmark, Poland or Sweden.
It was never an ethnically Russian area.
How can this be any better then a paperless voting mashine that has gotten a lot of bad press in here lately? The fact that it is based on linux doesn't help one bit unless people can actually verify what code are running on the servers during the election. Blackbox voting is blackbox voting, no matter what anyone claims is in the box.
Failing to learn from history dooms you to repeat it.
---and even if they do have some idea today, they won't when they crank up the numbers.
With electronic voting, the ballots are invisible. Nobody can be assured their ballot tallied is the same as their ballot cast. Period, end of story.
If they tag the votes to the voters, they could audit to double check things, but that's a big problem too. You can't have a free will if those in charge know what your choices were. That's why we don't have votes tied to voters here. Our founders knew better.
Without being able to personally identify the votes cast to the voters, they cannot be assured the system actually honored the voters intent. Open Source, closed source does not matter.
It's the form the vote is recorded in that matters. Nobody can see electrons and other subtle physical things used to record machine useable voting records and that's the problem because it forces the people to vote by proxy. Where there is a proxy, manupulation of the process is going to happen. That's just how we are.
If the votes are stored on physical media, then the results of the election can be known and trusted. Also, the act of indicating your voter intent and making the record is one an the same. --No proxy in most cases, save those goofy machines with punches. The voter knows the record they placed on the ballot and can walk away knowing their vote is correct.
When it comes time for counting, machines can read the human made records and humans can watch that happen. Other humans can check the records and audit the machines. If it's all nuts, lots of humans can watch each other count all the ballots...
As for this direct democracy crap, it's just a smoke screen. Oooh our leaders won't want to hear what we have to say. Bull shit. The electronic machines mean they don't actually have to, not the other way around!
What better way to devalue the democratic process. Make it easy and quick. Fewer expectations that way, and it's supposedly cheaper too!
Want an informed and active population that actually self-governs? Put the process in their hands, not some corporation or other exclusive club. There are always plenty of people able to help run the election, we don't need the machines and never will.
These poor fuckers are going to watch their democracy evaporate one machine at a time. Watch that nation and see if it runs significantly different in the near term. When the people are no longer a check on their own government, things will change for the worse.
Look at the USA for clear evidence of that.
30 percent of our national vote was cast with invisible ballots. We have no fucking idea who won '04, only who says they won.
Blogging because I can...
Estonia is the country that gave us KaZaa (or at least the programmers who wrote the code).
and same programmers did also the Skype.
Exactly. The absolute last people who should be writing law are lawyers. Not only will they put all kinds of obscure jargon (allegedly to clarify things) but it is also an extreme conflict of interest. Lawyers make their money by serving as advocates on different sides of disputes over various laws.* They have a vested interest in increasing both the number and complexity of laws, thus justifying their existance as advocates. They have no particular interest however in writing good law. only the quantity and complexity is important.
.. oh crap.
*also consulting as to the implications of law, but that's really just an extension of the advocate role.
Putting lawyers in charge of writing law is like like letting politicians dictate campaign finance rules and
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Estonia has an electronic ID card. You can read about it here(in english) http://www.id.ee/pages.php/0303 and about Estonian Internet voting from here http://www.vvk.ee/elektr/docs/Yldkirjeldus-eng.pdf