The world's first election via the Internet: a report from Estonia
The Estonian Agricultural Republic with a population of one and a half million was considered rather backward during Soviet times, and 15 years ago half of the residents 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, donated the world the Skype program, and now 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 4th. Although polling stations were open only on Sunday, 30,000 people gave their votes on Wednesday, that is, 3.5% of Estonian voters - they all voted online. At the end of the week, the number of "online voters" will, of course, be much more.
Tarvi Martens, 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 the Baltic country, most banking transactions are carried out through the Internet. If people trust the Internet money, then they trust their vote in the elections without any doubt.
The e-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 more than 1 million of the 1.3 million adults in Estonia had already acquired. To generate a digital signature from your PC, you also need a special card reader, which is sold in Estonian stores for $ 8. Many citizens have already bought such a device for a long time, because it gives access not only to the voting system, but also to many other services on the central state portal.
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To vote, you need to insert the card into the reader, run the web-based voting program in IE (Firefox browser is not fully supported, you need to install the program manually on Linux and update ID-certificates and other functions are not available), after which the list of batches appears on the screen and candidates. The whole process is well illustrated in the photostream Jaanus1 .
The e-voting interface is objectively simpler than huge paper sheets with multiple sheets. The voter's voice in encrypted form is sent to the voting server, where it is decrypted on Sunday, at a specific time. Each voice can be tracked and checked, 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 the example of Estonia 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 online elections will be held in Hawaii .
However, the technology of voting via the Internet raises concerns among some experts, who talk about the possibility of outside interference in the voting procedure. First of all, we are talking about typical computer system vulnerabilities (viruses, trojans, DDoS attacks on the voting server, etc.). Anyway, having taken someone else's smart card (and two PIN codes), it is theoretically possible to steal someone else's vote in elections. However, the risk of such theft is small. But with a competent and transparent voting procedure it is absolutely impossible to carry out a massive fraud of results. Many experts believe that e-voting is much safer than manipulating paper ballots. As in theory, you need to correctly organize the process of will expression, protected from manipulation, in the articles under the links below.
Related Links:
Alexander Militsky. Impartiality Strategy. - Journal "Computerra"
Alexander Militsky. "The conscious need to choose." - Journal "Computerra"
Wired magazine published an interesting report from the Estonian elections , which ended yesterday, March 4th. Although polling stations were open only on Sunday, 30,000 people gave their votes on Wednesday, that is, 3.5% of Estonian voters - they all voted online. At the end of the week, the number of "online voters" will, of course, be much more.
Tarvi Martens, 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 the Baltic country, most banking transactions are carried out through the Internet. If people trust the Internet money, then they trust their vote in the elections without any doubt.
The e-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 more than 1 million of the 1.3 million adults in Estonia had already acquired. To generate a digital signature from your PC, you also need a special card reader, which is sold in Estonian stores for $ 8. Many citizens have already bought such a device for a long time, 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-based voting program in IE (Firefox browser is not fully supported, you need to install the program manually on Linux and update ID-certificates and other functions are not available), after which the list of batches appears on the screen and candidates. The whole process is well illustrated in the photostream Jaanus1 .
The e-voting interface is objectively simpler than huge paper sheets with multiple sheets. The voter's voice in encrypted form is sent to the voting server, where it is decrypted on Sunday, at a specific time. Each voice can be tracked and checked, 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 the example of Estonia 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 online elections will be held in Hawaii .
However, the technology of voting via the Internet raises concerns among some experts, who talk about the possibility of outside interference in the voting procedure. First of all, we are talking about typical computer system vulnerabilities (viruses, trojans, DDoS attacks on the voting server, etc.). Anyway, having taken someone else's smart card (and two PIN codes), it is theoretically possible to steal someone else's vote in elections. However, the risk of such theft is small. But with a competent and transparent voting procedure it is absolutely impossible to carry out a massive fraud of results. Many experts believe that e-voting is much safer than manipulating paper ballots. As in theory, you need to correctly organize the process of will expression, protected from manipulation, in the articles under the links below.
Related Links:
Alexander Militsky. Impartiality Strategy. - Journal "Computerra"
Alexander Militsky. "The conscious need to choose." - Journal "Computerra"
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/5096/
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