How do you design an e-voting platform?

The coronavirus has led to postponed and canceled elections around the world—everywhere from Bolivia to North Macedonia. But one country has been prepared for this kind of crisis: Estonia, which has had a robust system for electronic voting for 15 years. Though it does not have an election scheduled until 2021, its e-government platform allows 99 percent of state services to take place online. Every Estonian citizen is required to have a digital identity card that contains a chip that can be used for encrypted government services, and allows identities to be authenticated without physical contact. The country's e-government platform is being mobilized in response to the coronavirus to allow for digital notarization, sick leave applications, work-force sharing, symptom self-assessment, medical consultations, and more. 

Tarvi Martens was the head architect of Estonia's e-government system, serving in various capacities to build the nation's digital election infrastructure. He studied at Tallinn Technical University, where he researched the security of digital signatures. For the past twenty years, he has been an integral player in the development of Estonia's digital ID and i-voting infrastructure. He uses the term “i-voting” because, as he says, “e-voting is more generic term involving also voting with machines in polling station (like some of you do, total waste of money).”

Now, he's an independent consultant, and has advised the governments of Georgia, Cyprus, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and Bosnia and Herzegovina on various e-government projects. 

Contributing editor Linda Kinstler spoke with him by WhatsApp about what it takes to build a secure infrastructure for electronic voting. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What is the current state of internet voting in Estonia?

We have been practicing i-voting since 2005, 11 times in total. Nearly 50 percent of every vote comes in electronically. We started with two percent of votes being i-votes, so it has been a long journey. 

Does that mean there has been a scaling down of in-person voting stations?

They have shrunk a bit, because so many votes come in electronically that there is no need to have that many voting stations anymore. But paper voting is still going on. It will not disappear.

How did you get i-voting off the ground? How were you able to implement it so effectively?

Time does it. We started from the ground up. In 2002, we introduced electronic ID cards, and by 2006 we had delivered 1 million of those cards. The Estonian population is about 1.3 million, so nearly everyone sane enough had ID cards with an electronic part, but just few people actually used them.

I-voting actually started politically, when the ruling party had the wonderful idea to bring it to the table. I started working on it in 2003, working off of one paragraph in [Estonian] law which said, well, internet voting, in principle, can happen, not before two years, using digital ID cards. That was it. The rest has been constant development. What helps, here, is the overall culture of using electronic identities and signatures, which is very widespread. We are approaching 1 billion digital signatures—for a small nation, that’s not that bad. This kind of behavior of using digital identities in various forms such as ID-card, Mobile-ID, Smart-ID, for electronic transactions is a cultural thing that has evolved over the years. It took time. Now, this history is almost two decades long.

How is Estonia responding to the coronavirus, and are digital IDs playing a role in that?

Well, we’re not doing that poorly, but not that well. Kind of average, I guess. We have all the restrictions in place. It might be easy for the media to say that we are accustomed to all this, because we’re doing everything remotely anyway. But the social part is missing, of course, and no electronics can replace that. We don’t have an election scheduled until next year, so internet voting isn’t helping, right now, very much. 

Have other nations reached out to you for advice about the possibility of adopting similar voting systems? 

We have a map in our office, we put a pin in every country that comes to ask those questions. It’s pretty much filled. It’s hard to name any country that has not been interested.

What do you tell them? 

It’s pretty simple, really. You have to have two ingredients: One is political will, the second is solid, secure, widely-used electronic identity. If you have those, you can do it.

When did countries first start coming to you? Has there been an uptick in interest? 

It comes and goes. There have been setbacks, in world history, regarding failures over internet voting projects. It’s a sad thing, of course. Interest has been growing, but not that rapidly. I’m sure coronavirus will add to it.

 So far, a number of countries have delayed or canceled elections in light of the pandemic. What do you make of how these nations are visibly struggling to maintain democratic procedures?

Well, if you don’t have this culture already, then you’re out of luck, of course. Internet voting isn’t something you can introduce momentarily. The pre-condition is that you have a working electronic identity environment that is available to everyone, and actually used. Internet voting is just one application of electronic identity. Digital signatures benefit society much more than i-voting. It’s a daily thing. It has been calculated somehow, that electronic identities save Estonia two percent of GDP. We have to contribute two percent to military expenses as a NATO member. So, you can say, because of electronic identity, NATO comes for free.

Are these digital IDs also playing a role in emergency response?

I’m not sure. You can replace paper, you can replace physical meetings, but of course for medical care, that has to be in person. We have e-prescriptions, an online patient portal, stuff like that.

One of the obvious concerns about digital IDs is that they might be used for surveillance and malicious forms of population control.

Ok, well, that might be true, if you don’t have an underlying system of guarantees of privacy. There are many ways to do that. The Estonian way is that we have something in place called X-Road, which concerns the exchange of data between governmental and also private institutions. This is a secure data exchange platform that does not allow for the malicious use of crisscrossing data. The system is distributed, so that every ministry, every agency, has its own data. The threat is that you might be able to piece together someone’s identity across these different databases. X-Road prevents that. There’s another way to prevent this, which is assigning people different digital IDs for every ministry and agency, so you cannot put the data back together. That’s the Austrian way, supposedly.

Obviously, data privacy is an issue. When implemented properly, it can work. It has proven to work here. 

You said when we first started talking that you’ve been preparing for the current moment for a long time.

[Laughs] Yeah, it feels like that. Estonians, they prefer to sit home, not to meet people too much, to do things remotely. 

Has that affected how Estonians are experiencing this crisis, then?

Definitely.

What have been the political implications of i-voting?

In the first couple of elections, it was a new thing, more younger people went to vote. From the third election that used i-voting, in 2009, until today, the profile of the internet voter has become the profile of the average voter. So there is no difference anymore. We have a party whose electorate is less educated, perhaps Russian-speaking. This electorate doesn’t use computers too much, so they get fewer internet votes. If you look at just those numbers, they would start to worry you. But there is good research that suggests that internet-voting has not had political implications. Voters’ interest in democracy does not change with the method of voting. If you’re not interested, the internet doesn’t help you. The research found that if you removed internet voting today, the political outcome would not change.

But it takes time to get there.

Estonia is one case, Austria is another. How do you advise larger nations on this transition? In the US, any small change to the voting procedure risks excluding thousands and thousands of people. How do you avoid that?

The introduction of internet voting is meant to be a complementary channel. It won’t exclude anyone. It brings in people who, I don’t know, might be traveling at the time of the election to the vote. Five to six percent of every vote comes in from abroad. Those are people who might not be able to vote otherwise. It’s about inclusion. It’s not about changing the process, or making it cheaper to administer elections. It’s an additional channel, and it requires more resources, obviously. It’s an extra cost up front. But in the long run, every i-vote is three times cheaper than a paper one.

Politicians, they’re not interested primarily in the budget—forget about it—or in the well-being of the citizen. No. They’re interested in getting re-elected. So they don’t want to mess with the election system, because they cannot predict what might happen if they change anything. Political will is a must. If there’s no consensus there, then forget about it.

Linda Kinstler is a contributing editor at The Ballot. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, Wired, The Economist, and more.