Government, transparency, and open-source

The Baltic state of Estonia — population 1.3 million — is one of the smallest in Europe. Highly developed, with the highest per capita GDP of any of the former Soviet republics, it also ranks high in the Human Development Index. Its people enjoy civil liberties, a free press, economic freedom, and a high standard of education.

At the same time, it is one of Europe’s most connected countries, and a world leader in e-democracy and government transparency. Between 2000 and 2004, the Estonian government took the strategic decision to develop the use of the internet, organizing nationwide training initiatives for adults financed by the private sector that educated more than 100,000 people, 10 percent of the total population, with the result that more than 70 percent of people now use the internet frequently.

All education centers in Estonia are connected to the internet, allowing students to see their grades, attendance records, and to access teaching materials and homework, as well as teachers’ final evaluation of their work.

Since August 2000, cabinet meetings no longer use paper, instead facilitating communication through a system of data bases connected by the web. Via the internet, voters can access in real time information about government spending. An electronic voting system based on a digital identity card, which just 1.9 percent of the population used when it was introduced in 2005, was taken advantage of by a quarter of voters in the 2011 parliamentary elections.

And Estonia’s latest step? In a bid to guarantee further transparency, two days ago it released the source code of the voting system used to manage its electronic voting system on GitHub, (only the server-side source code, as releasing the client-side would make creation of fake clients too easy).

By publishing the source code, the Estonian government hopes that any programmer can put it to the test, detect any possible problems, weaknesses, or security failings, and above all, establish the total transparency of the process (an auditing system will guarantee that the software used in the elections is the same as that available in the repository): a clear case of security through transparency, not opacity, and the very opposite of what happened in the United States when it used Diebold machines, which because they were developed in secret, ended up being the cause of all sorts of problems and controversy. Overseeing an election in a country of 1.3 million people is not the same as in a nation of more than 200 million, but it is nevertheless clear that the United States chose the wrong system.

Electronic voting systems are far from straightforward. Their design must ensure that nobody can falsify the outcome of a vote, that only those eligible are allowed to use them, that votes are counted just once, that each voter can check that their vote has been deposited correctly, that an auditor can verify the integrity of the process, that nobody can interfere with the vote, that nobody can discover who has voted for who, and that voters cannot sell their votes to third parties.

In Estonia, voters can submit their ballot as often as they wish—in other words, change their minds—during the e-voting window open the week before election day itself, with the last vote being the one that is counted. This method is aimed at putting the voter in control, making it difficult to force people to vote in favor of one candidate or another, or to buy votes, given that it is possible simply to change one’s vote within the seven-day window.

By allowing access to the source code of its e-voting system, Estonia is not only improving confidence in it, but is setting a precedent that could be followed by other countries looking to install electronic voting. It could soon be technologically possible to do so in Spain, which has pioneered the use of digital identity cards.

Needless to say, technology is not the only factor at play: transparency is, at bottom, a matter of will, the desire to do things in a certain way. Sadly for Spain, this remains a distant hope.