Estonia pioneers internet voting

A tiny Baltic nation last week became what appears to be the first country to open its local elections to internet voting on a nationwide level - although only about one per cent of the votes were cast online.

Estonia - which has a population of roughly 1.4 million - counted a total of about half a million votes in its local government council elections, according to preliminary numbers on the Estonian National Electoral Committee's website. Roughly 6,000 of those votes were cast online, according to preliminary town-level tallies posted on the site.

Election officials told the Associated Press that they considered the elections a success and had received no reports of glitches or attempted hacking. In January, they tested the system by having approximately 800 residents in the city of Tallinn register their responses to a poll.

The online system works through use of an electronic identification card. Since 2002 the card has been mandatory for all Estonia residents older than 15. The card is intended as a means of proving one's identity at any place - from banks to government offices - that normally requires identification to process forms or transactions.

To vote online, users must insert their cards into readers connected to their computers and log on to the voting website. Once authenticated, they cast their ballots through an encrypted system and then affix their digital signatures to verify the selections before transmitting them.

Thad Hall, a professor at the University of Utah and co-author of a book on internet voting said: "This country seems to have made a very concerted investment in promoting e-government generally, and this is just one component of what they're doing. It sounds pretty likely they're going to keep doing these types of activities into the future."

Hall said he believes Estonia to be the first country that has carried out internet voting nationwide in an actual election, although France, the UK and the US have also conducted pilots.

Estonia's relatively small voting population may curb the level of risk for tampering, said David Wagner, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley who has spoken out about the possible vulnerabilities of internet-based systems.

Wagner said: "There's a lot more incentive to hack an election if there are millions of voters and you can swing important races. Whereas, if only hundreds of voters are voting over the internet, there's going to be a lot less incentive to exploit the vulnerabilities."

Voting on PCs, he added, is an "inherently insecure platform" that always poses a risk of viruses, worms and spyware that are "targeted to subvert the election by either monitoring how people vote or tampering with the votes that are submitted".

Anne Broache writes for CNET News.com