Estonian Internet Voting Called a Success 291
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.
Privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Isn't Estonia that "fake country" in Dilbert? (Score:3, Interesting)
Direct Democracy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Some of the best things come from Estonia (Score:1, Interesting)
As for security of on-line elections vs. paper elections--bah!! I've never had to show any form of identification when I've voted (here in the U.S.). Identity verification is done via signature (and how closely do you think each signature is examined?). Besides there's all sorts of monkey business that could go on behind the scenes (just how many elections monitors are there?). What *really* scares me is proprietary electronic voting machines from companies owned by high-profile Republicans.
Re:A success? With a 1% turnout? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.