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  • Hacker News
  • 15+ years of Estonian public sector IT experience, former chief architect of the country here. AMA.

    This source code being open is great, but it’s not the wole story. E-voting is deliberately designed to fit into the context of voting in general and into the societal context. Your paper vote always overrides your electronic vote and there’s provisions in the law allowing cancellation of electronic voting and immediately falling back to paper. In the societal context, electronic identity and signatures are ubiquitous, voting is the least it’s used for.

    Thus, the question is not if the system the code implements is secure but if the whole thing is. Of course, if you find a security issue in the code, get in touch and your contribution will be welcomed. But please do not claim e-voting to be inherently insecure without an understanding of how it works on the ground and what happens around it. Happy to explain.

    by belZaah
  • The best way to secure elections is to have a system where winners have to give up worldly pleasures, ties and all privacy to rule.

    It works great for the military and for the clergy where it is even worse. I don't know why we don't something like that for the rulers.

    by lolakutty
  • Lots of concerns in the discussion yet the fact is that e-voting is used for quite a long time in Estonia, and proved robust and secure. It will scale well. Check the source code.

    I believe the Swiss also open sourced their e-voting software.

    by SP3269
  • Quality of the code is something. With all the respect to Estonian government but I expected to see something much more high grade. Sad.
    by cristaloleg
  • There are a lot of folks who, whenever this topic comes up, seem to have no knowledge of the systems which already exist and have actually been used in real elections already. For instance, ElectionGuard has been used in several real elections in the US since 2020[1].

    [1]: https://electionguard.vote/

    by devin
  • Living in Estonia, I have a hard time deciding how I feel about this voting system.

    Currently, with people trusting the government, this system is great. I can just cast my vote online, like I do everything else here, and I can be reasonably sure that my vote is counted thanks to the aforementioned trust in the system.

    But I really fear the day that trust erodes.

    On the other hand, though, once the trust is gone, I think it doesn’t really matter whether it’s an analog or digital count. People won’t trust the system anyways.

    Then again, there’s a lot of nuances and different levels of trust, which is the reason why I don’t know what the right answer is.

    by AndroTux
  • I'm Estonian. E-voting is widely accepted and used here. We've been doing it since 2001, and extensivelly (first parliamentary e-voting) since 2007. The fact that it's open source is long known (at least in the IT community) and highly appreciated. There's no inherent doubt about its validity in the local expert and international community.
    by kuratkull
  • Fully software, even a combo of software and hardware, cannot by itself make elections secure. Think of the Reflections On Trusting Trust problem, the need to verify firmware, etc. You can't ensure that machines _will_ work correctly, but you _can_ verify that they _did_. To do verify the machines' functioning after the fact you have to do it very soon after closing of the polls, and you have to devise a manual, statistical random sampling method where you manually check randomly sampled, marked paper ballots, against the digital cast vote record, then do a digital risk limiting audit to check that the CVR totals up to the machines' reported results. The sooner after closing of the polls you do this, the better the likelihood that any cheating will be caught. I.e., an immediate manual, partial audit of enough randomly-selected polling locations.

    That still leaves tons of other technical problems to address, like security of mail-ballots / absentee ballots, the security of ballot boxes used for early voting (because you probably cannot run the above manual partial audit due to then having nightly results available to the public; or maybe you accept that), voter registration, etc.

    by cryptonector

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