How Estonia became a leader in technology(economist.com) |
How Estonia became a leader in technology(economist.com) |
That's a total black box technology. Basically what they did is said "ok, let's vote using internet, and we'll believe results are true". They do not know is someone hacked them, etc. Voting data from the servers was transferred using personal computer and flash drive of some random sysadmin. It's horrible. In my opinion, they do e-voting for the sake of doing it and being 'first'. Though big thumbs up for e-citizenship.
IMHO, Baltic states are in the forefront of IT technologies. 3G works almost anywhere, 4G in cities. Internet is cheap and super fast (if you do not have 100Mbps connection - you have slow internet connection). You do your taxes, get your doctor appointments using internet and so on, for a very long time (since 2010 at least). All Baltic states have prominent startups, though Estonians where first to sell startup for big bucks (Skype).
How it currently works where I live is that, at the start of election day, all the volunteers and officials who are working for the day are allowed to inspect the urn, check for hidden compartments, and so on to ensure it's empty (And anyone can sign up to volunteer). Then they receive and place the votes in the urn together, and it remains sealed until the counting commences.
This creates a transparency that is simply not possible with an electronic solution. Even if it was possible to go through all software and hardware being deployed (A project which by itself would take years and cost millions), and the problem of being able to cast anonymous votes without the possibility of anyone finding out what you voted for was solved, you still hand over the democratic control of the election process to a small technological elite who will be doing these checks, while you gain very little from actually doing so.
Denmark tried to put an e-voting system in place a few years back but failed because one of the parties that was intially in favor where swayed by an angry group consisting in large part made up of computer science professionals and students.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/estonia-publishes...
If such an election was monitored by international observers, the way we often do with third world countries, the report could be summarised as "probably completely fraudulent, because we weren't allowed to verify anything".
E-voting is election fraud. Period.
Elections should be transparent and verifiable, and every voter should to cast their vote protected from outside interference (i.e., alone and unobserved in a voting booth). These things are not optional.
We put your e-ballot into two envelopes making sure cryptographically they require separate keys to open. Deliver it via a secured and openly described channel and provide a cryptographic receipt. We welcome tens and tens of voluntary observers all over the world to observe all the proceedings. And improve the processes and code with every iteration there is.
How is the electronic approach less secure than the physical one?
Also, what many do not realise, is the fallback. Should there be an inkling of doubt about whether your vote went where it was supposed to or was handled properly, you can go and vote physically on the voting day and have that vote prevail over the electronic one.
Except for Estonia (Estonia actually doesn't like to be associated that much with Baltics, their mentality is more in line with their northern neighbors.), governments here don't really know how to approach IT. They're just as much out of touch with modern technologies as US gov. It's quite chaotic and unregulated. Plus, silly amounts of corruption.
And the regulations that they do impose end up hurting the countries instead of helping them.
Plus, we are tiny countries (population-wise) that have 2nd world living standards. Not many people can afford to start startups.
All the mainstream media reports on such topics and especially technology should be taken with a boatload of salt.
Once you start adding more complicated math to it, you lose this very desirable property. Once you add tech, you have a black box (what does the silicon in this computer _really_ do?)
This is the key. I think many people does not understand this or does not approve of this. By going digital (like e-governance), use of paper is avoided but the procedure remains same. Does it save time? Sure, it does. But the process remains tedious as ever.
what's your point ? Ditching the process of having a government ?
In Finland when filling your tax forms online, the form comes prefilled with numbers that are calculated from your tax info of the previous year. If there are no changes in your salary or benefits, you can just agree to the the form and it is done, without typing out anything.
Saw this for national websites (tax, jobs), first version was heavy Java front and backend, complex, slow, full of requirements. Recently it was simplified (a little, sometimes a lot).
Once an Estonian journalist even wrote about our company - was fun! http://majandus24.postimees.ee/2080692/iisraeli-poisid-leiut...
Other countries in the area (namely Finland) also do this and fly around - we've had teams from Italy come visit us in Tel Aviv and other countries.
I can only imagine how it feels in the valley and how much visits you get.
Also, how has Estonia as a country benefited from this so far? The GDP/person seems to be stalling , although generally growing fast since the 00s. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries...
> The politicians and senior bureaucrats had not caught oil fever. A serious mining accident had recently brought down a government, and most did not want to touch oil matters with a bargepole. “Everything I said was met with, ‘Oh, you think so? Mmm. Maybe. Let’s wait and see’,” al-Kasim recalls. “This characteristic saved Norway from the curse of oil: the fact that they are completely incapable of getting carried away by the oil dream. They were very sceptical – plain horse sense basically. They didn’t want to move until it was absolutely proven that it was the right time to act.”
Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame. Contrary to that - in Israel failure at founding a startup is considered great because you tried and forfeited a comfy life for a while which people will respect you for.
Finland is spending a lot of money to change that perception - there are whole institutions that are working on it and they're doing a really good job but it takes time.
Finland is home to Supercell and Rovio, arguably the two biggest juggernauts in mobile gaming. This has spawned many studios there.
Sweden is also big in gaming as the home of Notch and his little multibillion dollar game company called Mojang with Minecraft. And of course PewDiePie with the youtube game review new era, it also has spawned all sort of gaming/tech interest there. They seem to have a play for entertainment as well with Kung Fury.
Both countries are a force in creating content with technology, which is probably the winning strategy and both places have been ignited by it.
That'd be completely useless for preventing people from proving how they voted, but is sufficient obfuscation for preventing the votes from becoming public.
Maybe 10-15 years ago. Now with the rise of successful startups and the national interest towards them, working at a startup is considered good and trendy and rather, most of the CS students avoid large companies. Even my mom was proud and supportive when I cofounded a startup, and she's always been the one to advocate for a good and stable job.
Our general technology industry is "restructuring", with pretty big layoffs at the large companies. The same week this spring Sony and Ericsson gave advance notice of upcoming layoffs to 1000 and 2000 people respectively.
While not a catastrophe in itself, and a several companies stepped in to offer jobs, it's worrying as a general indication of the state of our technological industry.
Turn off / pause recording: no idea what you even mean, there's physical presence of opposite parties throughout the entire process.
Bribe inspection-related personnel: again, volunteer driven with volunteers from all parties plus independents - it will be hard to bribe your direct competitors (and enough of them).
The higher levels where numbers are tabulated publicize all numbers (in and out), so anything that's off can be verified locally in a distributed way.
The idea is that everything happens under public scrutiny. I don't see how that could work with fun algorithms and probabilities that only some experts can understand.
The main problem is that seemingly opposing forces collude secretly, but there won't be a fix for that in the voting mechanism.
Also, I never mentioned "secure". That's a red herring when it comes to any form of electronic voting. It's about democracy, which includes the guarantee that each vote is cast in absolute freedom.
Nobody can hold a gun to a voters head, and no voter can be forced to justify their vote afterwards, because they and only they know what they voted.
We didn't build that guarantee into our democracies by accident, and taking it because we've invented some shiny new toys that bring us nothing but some minor convenience is an insult to democracy.
And like I said, it's ridiculous that we hold third world countries and new democracies to those standards, but have started to massively ignore them ourselves, because we are too lazy to maintain the very foundations of our democracy.
Hence, in a true democracy, the only free way to vote is at a polling station, in a voting both constructed in such a way that I have total privacy from the moment I vote to the moment I put the vote in the ballot box, yet transparant enough so it can be observed by anyone (hence, short curtains, box in the same open space, etc).
We even put polling stations in hospitals, care homes, embassies abroad, military bases etcetera to ensure voting happens in total freedom, transparency and anonymity. This principle also applies to the counting of the votes.
All of this did not come about by accident, and the fact that it's being abandoned by people who do not wish to even argue why they want to remove fundamental democratic safeguards should be met with extreme suspicion.
The arguments in favor of electronic voting are extremely weak, and in many instances e-voting has already been found to be subject to deliberate manipulation.
There is no excuse for lowering our standards for the most essential element of a democracy.
Edit: A colleague phrased this brilliantly before: "We have these machines that can do literally anything we want them to, and instead we're using them as a poor imitation of paper"
In Germany as a business owner I'm required to file taxes electronically. But then in the last step I still have to print out some of forms and send them via snail mail to the German tax office.
And don't get me started about registering a new company. It takes weeks and you need to visit a notary. (Coincidentally last week I created a UK Ltd to hold some intellectual property. It took 20 minutes and I paid the fee via PayPal. And the next day everything was ready to go.)
There are really different school of thoughts when it comes to administration. And you can't just slap an electronic form ontop of an over-regulated dinosaur and automagically become a modern & agile institution.
I assumed Germany was more organized than that.
In reality, even with e-signatures and what not it's far from that. You submit multiple documents to multiple government offices, processing takes days, and there is plenty of printing, mailing and scanning going on behind the scenes.
Problem is, governments have little incentive to improve UX, as they face no competition. You either put up with the bureaucracy and stupid big forms, or... well, there's no other option.
