But as we soon determined, e-voting in Estonia's local elections had been a resounding success. There were no technical problems, no hackers broke through. As an accredited observer, I was convinced that the system worked and that the results had not been manipulated. The vote confirmed Estonia's leadership in e-governance but, more important, it offered the world a glimpse of what the elections of a new era might look like -- in Europe, the United States and elsewhere.
A dispatch, then, from the e-voting future.
It is no accident that the first e-elections took place in Estonia. The Baltic Sea nation of 1.4 million tucked hard against Russia had reclaimed its independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 -- and it never looked back. Eager to differentiate itself from Russia and other countries in the region, Estonia positioned itself as a technological trailblazer. It quickly became a leader in e-everything, with citizens paying parking fees via cellphones and submitting tax declarations online.
Online elections were a natural next step. Estonia already had in place some of the practical elements for e-voting. Citizens must carry chip-based ID cards that include digital signatures, allowing them to be unambiguously identified online after logging in to vote. Although the country's rate of Internet use is not terribly high -- about 60 percent, compared with 70 percent in the United States -- it has a strong e-banking system, which increases trust in the Internet for important transactions. (In my experience, Estonia's Internet banking is more advanced, more customer-friendly and safer than that of the United States.)
Still, e-voting has not been unanimously accepted here. The country's Reform Party, representing the most e-literate voters -- often younger and more urban -- has favored the innovation, as has the nationalist and pro-market Fatherland Party, whose leaders think the effort provides great global PR for the country. But parties drawing support from older and poorer voters hurt by the post-Soviet changes, such as the Center Party and People's Union Party, have opposed e-voting. The digital divide is alive and well here.
In the 2005 vote, electronic voting and traditional voting via paper ballots took place. As a confidence-building measure, those who cast e-votes were allowed to replace them with paper ballots later. Overall, though, few Estonians availed themselves of e-voting -- about 2 percent of those who voted did so via the Internet. And with slightly less than half the Estonian electorate opting to vote at all, that amounts to a 1 percent online turnout.
There is no evidence that e-voting increased Estonia's overall turnout, either: The typical online voter is a politically motivated person who has an Internet connection, not a gamer or YouTube aficionado who decides to vote for the first time because he or she is already online. But even so, online voting did have some political impact in last year's election: The Internet-savvy Reform Party did better among online voters than it did in the overall tally -- 32.7 percent of the e-vote vs. 16.9 percent overall -- while the less tech-friendly parties performed decidedly worse among Internet users. For instance, the Center Party won 25.5 percent overall, but only 8.7 percent of the e-vote. How that will play in the future, with larger samples, is unclear, but it seems logical that as e-voting becomes more prevalent, parties that attract e-literate voters will benefit.
Language and cultural barriers also may have posed a challenge to e-voting: Estonia's ethnic Russians, who account for more than a quarter of the population, generally avoided the online option. Their difficulty understanding Estonian-language Web sites may have contributed to their reluctance, and this population also tends to lag behind economically and to display less Internet expertise than the rest of the country.
The election in Estonia did experience one technical glitch. An ID card was not enough for e-voters; they needed to have the card validated for online use and had to purchase an ID-card reader for approximately $15, which requires software that was tricky to install on laptops and PCs. I had to ask an expert friend for help.
Estonia's parliamentary elections set for spring 2007 will again allow e-voting along with the traditional kind. Some hope that this second effort will bring new voters into the political process, though the 2005 results don't suggest that. Yet, as a 23-year-old student of mine recently said, "Perhaps now with e-voting also some people will vote who didn't vote before, so that it actually balances out."
The impulse to continually upgrade information and communication technology is so irresistible that I suspect much of the world will follow Estonia's e-voting example. It is the future of politics, notwithstanding the warnings of people such as Internet theorist Manuel Castells, who contends that e-voting poses risks to democratic legitimacy.
Such risks should not be ignored, even in the most technologically adept nations. As long as there is a political digital divide -- with one party's followers more Internet-capable than another's -- a move toward e-voting could easily skew electoral results. Moreover, even just the ritual of going to a voting booth on Election Day with one's fellow citizens can be a significant social act, one that underscores the community-based aspects of democracy, with individuals truly coming into their own as citizens. Might removing that experience in favor of a mere mouse click from home or work somehow erode the culture of democracy, a culture that must endure if the system is to function properly and to last? And might the secrecy of one's vote -- a key principle of democratic elections, one that is guaranteed when a voter is alone in a booth with his ballot and his conscience -- be compromised with a universal distance-voting option, where it is almost impossible to make sure no one is peeking over your shoulder?
Estonia's pioneering e-voting experience has not seemed to harm democracy here. But it does provide lessons that cut in several directions. Online voting is possible, and can be carried out without technical roadblocks. Yet the impact on democracy hinges on the context and conditions in each nation, particularly the extent to which technological awareness is not spread evenly across a population. When e-voting becomes a significant form of voting in Estonia and elsewhere, the new winners and losers of elections won't just be the candidates, but also different segments of society with disparate technical abilities -- and they may be different winners and losers than the country had before.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Wolfgang Drechsler
Quelle/Source: Washington Post, 05.11.2006
