AP:
This tiny Baltic republic is breaking new ground in digital democracy. This week, the country nicknamed “e-Stonia” because of its tech-savvy population became the first country in the world to hold an election allowing voters nationwide to cast ballots over the Internet.
Less than 10,000 people, or 1 percent of registered voters, participated online in elections for mayors and city councils across the country, but officials hailed the experiment held Monday to Wednesday as a success.
“Everything has gone smoothly,” said Tarvi Martens, a spokesman for the National Electoral Committee.
Thousands of people voted online in Democratic primaries in Arizona in 2000 and Michigan in 2004. The city of Geneva, Switzerland, has held several online referendums, the first in January 2003.
But Estonia is the first to allow voters nationwide to chose their representatives online, experts in Estonia and abroad said.
“They have the perfect population size to do something like this,” said Thad Hall, a University of Utah political scientist and co-author of book on Internet voting. “As they have success, people will start to copy their success.”
Election officials in the country of 1.4 million said they had received no reports of flaws in the online voting system or hacking attempts.
In the United States, the Pentagon canceled an Internet voting plan for military and overseas citizens in 2004 because of security concerns. Plans for large-scale voting in Britain have also been dropped.
