Estonia To Allow Mobile Phone Voting

 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.”