Estonia To Allow Mobile Phone Voting
By Glenn Church | Related entries in Elections, Technology
 Estonia is setting the world standard for incorporating technology and voting. Last year, Estonia operated a successful internet voting election. In 2011, Estonia will become the first country to allow voting by cell phone.
Voters will be required to get a special chip for their cell phone. The chips are free and allow for the authentification of digital signatures.
Estonia is at the cutting edge of numerous voting reforms involving technology. As a small country, it has the opportunity to experiment and tinker with new ideas without a massive technological makeover.
For example, by using an identification card, voters can vote multiple times on election day, but the last vote overrides any previous votes.
Internet voting has also been used in a variety of other places, including Estonia. An Estonian colleague of mine demonstrated the system for me. He inserted his national ID card (a smartcard) into a PCMCIA card reader in his laptop. This allowed him to authenticate to an official government web site where he could then cast his vote. He was perfectly comfortable letting me watch the whole process because he said that he could go back and cast his vote again later, in private, overriding the vote that I saw him cast. This scheme partly addresses the risk of voter coercion and bribery…but it doesn’t do anything for the insecurity of the client platform.
As noted above in Freedom-to-Tinker.com, there remain some concerns. Nevertheless, the process has been relatively smooth thus far for Estonia.
This voting system does have some advantages for people who live in remote areas or are unable to physically vote on election day. In the United States, these people would vote absentee. The downside with absentee voting is that an election has days or weeks remaining. A development may occur that will prompt a voter to reconsider a vote. With an absentee ballot that is not possible. However, internet or mobile phone voting allows the voter to revote right up until the polls close.
It is a bit of a twist on the old Chicago voting joke of “voting early and often.†In Estonia, it is possible to do that legally, but only one vote counts.
Here is a link with more details about how Estonia is becoming an “E-Country.â€
(from Foolocracy.com)
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 and is filed under Elections, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 13th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
I wonder how secret an internet or cellphone vote would be. If a tyrant wanted to find out and “deal” with those who voted against him, this seems like it might be an ideal system.
December 14th, 2008 at 7:42 am
The opportunity for election fraud is massive not just in Estonia, but what about other governments that may have a vested interest in seeing someone elected who may not be the Estonian people’s choice. The Chinese have repeatedly hacked into computer banks at all levels of our government – what’s to prevent that same level of cyber crime when it comes to elections. This type of voting is freightening in its implications. It isn’t a private process and it’s simply a poor way to run an election. I prefer the mail-in ballot sent, received, and certified by a local election board over a process of 3-5 weeks, plenty of time for even the slowest or most remote voter to respond. The problem isn’t how we vote inasmuch as it is the process for counting those votes.
December 15th, 2008 at 8:10 am
I would probably have said “setting the world standard for naivete.” After all,
The most comical part of this is the rich, deeply textured irony. Here we all stand amidst the wreckage of an economic failure caused largely by placing trust in a series of schemes that hardly anyone bothered to really understand at a basic level….mortgage backed-securities, subprime loans, credit default swaps, , and so on. This was in turned backed by folks blithely reassuring us that real estate prices would only ever go up. “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” they told us.
And yet here’s someone advocating for the wider spread of a system of voting whose mechanics are ultimately far beyond the comprehension of 99.9% of the people. For the vast majority, how these things work becomes a black box, sooner or later. But I’m sure it’ll be fine.
December 15th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
DMinor – From a computer security standpoint there are three points at which your vote and identity could be attacked
1) On your computer before being encoded and sent. This would require the installation of some sort of malware onto your system. If you’ve ever had a virus you know that can certainly happen but its preventable by exercising due diligence. Furthermore, it is not easy for a piece of malware to recognize that what you’re doing is voting, and even more difficult to send out the results of its snooping.
2) In transit. Assuming the vote is encoded with standard algorithms used in cryptography (every browser is enabled for this – thats what the little lock icon in the corner when you enter your password for a site means) and that no mathematical genius comes along proving P=NP, its not going to happen. Your vote would be safe at least until we get a serious quantum computer at which point I assume it would be directed at decoding in seconds every single piece of confidential information ever stored on any system anywhere.
3) In the government owned database where your votes are tracked. Ok, thats a possibility but not a particularly grievous one. Off the top of my head, if I was to design such a system I would associate your vote not with your card’s id number but with the output of some hash of your number. What this would mean is that given that you know your id number you can see and overwrite your vote, but it would be virtually impossible to reverse the process to find out which ID number is associated with a given hash.
If you are interested in learning more look into cryptography, RSA hashing, and public key algorithms. It’s really nifty stuff and the math behind it isn’t all that difficult, certainly nothing that someone whose taken college level math courses shouldn’t be able to handle.