The Internet Voting Model Used in Estonia
By Matt Metzner on 09/05/2012 in estonia, internet elections, internet voting, online elections, online voting with 2 CommentsRead Time: 2 - 3 minutes
The first country to using internet voting as the means for conducting a national election was Estonia. During their 2005 elections, citizens were allowed to vote online for municipal offices. The system was built on an existing national ID framework where citizens had their personal information recorded along with their signatures. These ID cards allowed the election officials to securely certify the votes cast by each individual during the election period.
Estonia’s elections were unique not only in their being the first online election, but that the online polls were open for 7 days. Voters could securely log-on and vote or change their vote during this time, and the votes standing at the time the ballot closed would be counted. Not only does this allow individuals to change their mind, but gives every citizen a greater window of time to participate in the election. During this same period of time, voters could show up at physical polls and cast their ballot. If they chose to vote at a public polling place, their online vote was cancelled and their paper vote would be counted.
After successful municipal elections in 2005, Estonia implemented their online voting program in their national elections in 2007. During the first national election where voters were afforded the ability to vote online, 30,000 Estonians participated via Internet. This means only one in 30 Estonian voters chose to use the online ballot. Two years later in 2009, 104,415 voters participated online. This equates to just under 10% of the total eligible voters. During the most recent 2011 Parliamentary elections, over 140,000 voters participated online. This voting block represents 15% of eligible voters and 24% of voters participating in the election.
The rate of growth suggests that voters have a propensity to use the technology they are most familiar with initially. They can migrate to online options once they are presented, although it’s unlikely that they will all move at once.
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2 Comments
William Kelleher
09.07.2012
@William Kelleher
Important info, Matt! Also, Tarvi Martens, who designed the Estonia Internet voting system, says it’s “more secure than Internet banking” http://t.co/Jh6Onyd
Estonia has had more than five years of trials w/o security or technical incident, says Tarvi Martens
http://news.err.ee/sci-tech/bf5eeddd-2739-4b35-9a18-826ad772b9d6
Dan Richards
09.08.2012
@danrich
Here are some stats on this;
Number of persons with the right to vote: 1,059,292
Votes: 502,504
- valid (with e-votes) 496,336
- invalid 6,168
Voter turnout: 47%
E-votes given: 9,681
- incl. repeated e-votes 364
Number of e-voters: 9,317
E-votes counted: 9,287
E-votes cancelled: 30
Percentage of e-votes among all votes: 1.85%
Percentage of e-votes among votes of advance polls: 8%
Number of e-voters who used ID card electronically for the first time: 5,774
Percentage of e-voters who used ID card electronically for the first time: 61%
If you notice, two things are very different than what we would allow;
1) ID to vote, look at the number of first time voters that had to use their ID on line just to vote. And with right no9w here, the progressives and the courts are doing all they can to stop the use of IDs to vote.
2) the n umber of invalid votes- 6,168. The use of the ID made this easier to catch the fake votes, and remove them, but yet how many slipped past they did not catch. If you go by the rule-of-thumb, for every one you catch, ten slip by, that would be about 61,680, being that there was 496,336 votes, that would mean possibly a maximum of 12.43% instead of 1.24% could have been invalid. Yes they are small numbers, but the effect they could have on voting could be a advantage to a Political party.
These two things are of a important concern to me, as the effect could have very heavy consequences to any election.