Counting votes in just 2 hours instead of 2 weeks: how Estonia organized e-elections

The pandemic doesn't subside. Two weeks after the elections, a new anti-record was set: over 8 thousand cases per day. There are many reasons for the incidence rate, One of them could well have been elections: people staying in cramped unventilated areas for a long time is "excellent" conditions for contracting not only COVID-19 but any other virus.

It's too late to talk about how to hold safe elections in a pandemic. But new challenges may await us, and we can't imagine the "Digital State" without the ability to vote from a computer.

Since Estonia is the e-voting specialist, where e-voting has been held since 2005, we interviewed an expert, Epp Maaten, director of the cybersecurity program at the i-Governance Academy, which coordinated the IT projects of the National Electoral Committee, including internet voting in Estonia.