Estonia approves voting by mobile phone

Estonia’s parliament has approved a law that will make Estonia the first country in the world to allow voting by mobile phone. Estonia already has an Internet-based voting system that was used successfully in last year’s parliamentary vote. Expanding upon that success, Estonia intends on having a mobile voting system in place for its next election slated for 2011. The mobile voting system will require mobile voters to obtain a free, authorized chip for their phones that will verify owner identity and authorize participation in the mobile voting system. According to Raul Kaidro of Estonia’s SK Certification Center which oversees the current personal ID card system, the mobile voting system has been shown to be both reliable and secure in an independent security audit. Though other countries like Finland and Sweden posses the technology to implement a mobile voting system, Estonia hopes to be the first to actually use such a system in an election. No doubt the world will be watching to see how the system performs and if successful, we can only hope such an idea will soon be adopted in other countries.

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