Electronic voting in Estonia

[1] Estonian election officials declared the electronic voting system a success and found that it withstood the test of real-world use.

This assertion was challenged in August 2005 by Arnold Rüütel, then President of Estonia, who saw the new e-voting provisions in the Local Government Council Election Act as a breach of the principle of equality of voting.

Tally verification is done by mixnet, making use of homomorphic properties and elGamal encryption provided by Douglas Wikström.

Universal tally verification is not a mandatory part of the process, and is conducted by a dedicated data auditor.

[12] A working group was formed by Minister of Foreign Trade and Information Technology Kert Kingo in order to assess the "verifiability, security and transparency" of electronic voting.

[15] This criticism was underscored in May 2014, when a team of international computer security experts released their examination of the system, claiming they could breach the system, change votes and vote totals, and erase all evidence of their actions if they were to install malware on Estonian election servers.

The Estonian National Electoral Committee reviewed the concerns and published a response, saying that the claims "give us no reason to suspend online balloting".

[25][26] The serverside code was published under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license on GitHub as a result of those efforts in July 2013.

[31] In a 2012 overview of international e-voting implementations, IFES independent researchers found that, although insofar successful, in situation of "emerging international electoral standards with respect to Internet voting" Estonian voting system faces necessary improvements for "better legislation, a transparent policy and formalized procedures" as well as "broader democratic goals, such as enhancing civic e-participation" need to be considered.

[32] In 2013 Free Software Foundation Europe criticized partial publishing of the source code of e-voting system and for using non-software licenses for publication.

In 2011 Paavo Pihelgas created a trojan that was theoretically able to change voter's choice without user noticing.

The court dismissed the case because Pihelgas's "voter's rights had not been infringed as long as he had knowingly put himself into the situation".

[34][35] In 2015, an activist from the Estonian Pirate Party, Märt Põder, took credit for casting an invalid ballot "using a GNU debugger to locate the breakpoint in Linux IVCA where the candidate number is stored and replace it with an invalid candidate number".

[38][39] In 2016, computer scientists at the University of Oxford, while acknowledging relative success of conducting e-voting, they claimed that e-voting system officials "have relied since the system's inception on building trust through interpersonal relations," and that "may work well for a close-knit society such as that of Estonia".

[40] In beginning of June 2019, Kert Kingo, Minister of Foreign Trade and Information Technology of the newly elected government created an inclusive working group to assess the "verifiability, security and transparency"[41][42] of the Estonian electronic voting system.

The working group consisted of state officials, representatives from universities and research institutes, critics, and creators of the system.

[43][44] In December 2019 they presented results of the six-month investigation, with 25 proposals for improving the core infrastructure of the Estonian e-voting system.