Estonia looks set to be the first country in the world to allow citizens to vote by mobile. From the looks of it though, the barriers to entry leave the old pencil and paper as the more attractive option. You need a registered sim card, a special id card and after all that you can still change your mind and do it the old fashioned way.
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3 comments ↓
The most important thing isn’t the mechanism but the motivation – in the US elections, people of all ages queued for up to 4 hours to vote. It’s no bad thing to use technology to make democracy easier – but it’s not that important either.
It’s also critical to make sure that it actually works too – see http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/14/0251214&from=rss for an example of technology bugs causing lost votes. Of course, open source stuff is probably better on things like this, but usually loses out because it doesn’t have such well paid salesmen, expensive lobbyists and the other necessaries for government contracts, but how we tackle that challenge is probably something for another discussion
Your government could do worse than take some advice from Mart Laar (Estonian visionary leader), but then again he’s a fan of small government or starving the beast as he puts it.
Didn’t the Estonians invent Skype as well? I went there once, very friendly people.
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