Slashdot Mirror
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!
I wonder what would have had to happen for it to be considered a failure.
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
Estonia
You're welcome.
No, that's Elbonia- Estonia is about 50 miles north of where Elbonia is supposed to be. They're full of forests and songs instead of mud. (no, really- their revolution was called the "singing revolution" because as the soviet tanks were leaving, they were followed by crowds of people singing songs. Velio Tormis was their "Conductor General", and they've only been free since 1992).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Estonia is the fake country with the bearded people.
No thats Elbonia, and I deeply resent your ignorance we are not a fake country.
I actually wonder about some of those -stan prefixed former Russian countries...do they exist?
Well, the thing is those *stan countries were blasted into in orbit around Pluto by the Soviet space agency during the cold war since they proved to be a general nuisance. The only exception is Afghanistan which had to be brought down to earth a few years ago for a major overhaul due to a massive rodent infestation.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
. . . 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.
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
I actually wonder about some of those -stan prefixed former Russian countries...do they exist?
Like -stanUkraine? Or -stanGeorgia? Hmm. Not sure, but I think they're fake.
I quote others only in order the better to express myself. -- Michel de Montaigne
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.
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.