In the aftermath of new allegations that Russian hackers may have penetrated at least one US voting machine manufacturer in the lead up to last year’s US presidential election (though no allegations imply that this impacted vote totals in any way), new questions have been raised about what more can be done to secure the nation’s electoral system from hostile foreign actors. What might we learn from the the most advanced digital government in the world, Estonia, which has offered online voting for more than a decade?
Modern-day Estonia has become synonymous with the notion of reimagining how citizens interact with their government, making nearly every governmental service available from home or on the go via a mouse click. Since 2005 the country has allowed its citizens to cast their votes in pan-national elections via a secure online portal system, growing to over 30% of votes cast in the last several elections, according to Tarvi Martens, Chairman of the Estonian Electronic Voting Committee.
Citizens can vote as many times as they like up to election day, with only the final vote counting. Those who do not have access to a computer or who prefer old fashioned paper ballots can still vote by paper – evoting is an option rather than a mandate.
Interestingly, nearly a quarter of evotes in recent elections have been cast by people over the age of 55, with another 20% of evotes from the 45-54 age range. This suggests evoting enjoys broad support not just among young digital native millennials, but across the societal spectrum, especially among those who, at least in the US, are not typically viewed as early adopters of digital services.
To vote in Estonia, one simply visits the national election website and downloads and installs the voting application. Then you insert your national identity card into your computer’s card reader, fill out your digital ballot, confirm your choices and digitally sign and submit your eballot. You can do all of this from the comfort of your own home in the seven days leading up to election day.
Of course, one of the most common concerns regarding internet voting is the potential that one’s vote could be changed either by a virus on your computer or as your ballot transits the internet on its way to the central government servers. To address this, Estonia’s evoting system adds a novel twist: the ability to use your mobile phone to separately connect to the electoral servers via a different set of tools and services to see how your vote was recorded and verify that it is correct.
After casting your vote using your desktop computer you can thus pull out your smartphone and verify the results that were actually received by the central electoral servers. The results are encrypted so that no government official can see how you individually voted, only you can see your individual voting choices, even as they are aggregated into the national totals.
By physically separating vote casting and vote checking to two different devices (votes are cast via a desktop computer, while checking your vote must be performed on your phone), it makes it highly unlikely that even the most motivated attacker could compromise both devices in such a way that your vote could be changed without your knowledge. And of course, even after voting online, you can always show up at a polling station on election day and vote via paper ballot if you want.
The ability to verify through a physically separate channel that the data received by the government is what you sent goes a long way towards addressing many of the most common concerns about electronic voting.
Last year the University of Tartu and the Estonian National Electoral Committee published a fascinating 244-page report in English that looks back on Estonia’s decade of electronic voting and explores some of the more contentious issues like authentication/security and whether evoting creates bias by mobilizing more younger or demographically or ideologically biased portions of the populations, along with deployment issues like stickiness and obstacles and costs confronting nations considering deploying themselves.
Here in the US evoting offers immense potential to mobilize and empower the US electorate in ways never before seen. Candidates no longer would have to convince voters to both like them and also drive themselves to the polls and wait in long frustrating lines on election day. Indeed, a whole new generation of voters might participate if all they had to do was log onto a website and click a button to cast their votes from their couch and could change their votes as many times as they wanted in reaction to late-breaking news, rather than being locked into the early vote they cast awhile back.
Putting this all together, Estonia’s successful deployment of evoting over the past decade, rising to more than a third of all votes cast in recent elections, along with the novel security measures it has adopted, offers a powerful glimpse of the coming future from the most advanced digital government on the planet.
