We have already discussed about the increasing effect of web 2.0 on the political elections. Now, a Reuters article on Yahoo news is reporting that the Baltic state of Estonia anticipates becoming the world’s first country to allow voting via internet in a national parliamentary election that are scheduled for the next month.
By announcing this, Estonia, which quit Soviet Union back in 1991, tries to show its inclination towards the emerging technologies. Well, the e-voting system was experimented in which voters had to choose the ‘King of the Forest’ from a list of 10 animals. Arne Koitmae of the electoral commission commented:
It is hard to say how many people could vote (via the Internet), but 3,925 people used the system over the last week, when we used different testing scenarios to vote for the king of the forest.
Computer systems and security specialist Jaan Murumets further added in context to the security issues:
E-voting is not so difficult to think about here. We are used to using the Internet for business and for almost 10 years we have been using the Internet for banking.
Internet voting in Estonia will decide the future of two major coalition parties, the centre-right Reform Party and left-leaning Centre.
