Observer report of 2023 parliamentary elections
Although electronic voting has been used 13 times in various elections in Estonia since 2005, the legal, procedural, and technical problems are far from solved but have instead backfired, with the political situation getting more complicated.
Electronic voting is hard to observe because one can’t directly see into computers. In the case of Estonia, the cryptographic measures to verify the processes are only partially implemented. Still, as voters must download a voting application that implements a protocol with a public specification, observers/voters can obtain a unique insight into processes by implementing their tools to cast and verify the votes.
Engaging in that kind of participative observation with special tools in the 2023 parliamentary elections in Estonia, it appeared that the official voting software implemented a process that was not following the specification up to the point of diverging from requirements set in laws and subordinate regulative acts. In addition to a couple of vote containers that were processed ignoring the requirements, in the end, it appeared that arguably all 312,181 electronic votes cast with official voting applications had invalid digital signatures and failed to specify the electoral district in the vote text.
These kinds of ballots would have been declared invalid without hesitation in paper ballot elections. Still, electoral complaints filed about such electronic votes were dismissed without explaining why ballots that did not conform to legal requirements were counted. This has resulted in a parliament where 22 of 101 representatives have arguably gained their mandate based on invalid ballots. Still, this indicates that after about 20 years of electronic voting in Estonia, vast amounts of legal and technical make-believe are needed to run the elections.
If manageable in small-scale pilots and elections with low importance, this is hardly the case, with 51% of the voters in parliamentary elections casting their votes online during political polarisation rising to unprecedented heights.
Märt Põder
