Estonian-developed internet voting software was used in the Utah Republican caucus where the Utah Republicans voted to choose the party’s nominee for president in the 2016 election.
At the caucus, the voters had the opportunity to vote using traditional methods or to vote online. For online voting, the Utah Republican Party used a secure i-voting system developed by the Smartmatic-Cybernetica Internet Voting Centre of Excellence that is based in Estonia.
Sven Heiberg, the CEO of the centre said it was created as a joint venture between Cybernetica and Smartmatic, two global leaders in electronic voting systems.
“The software used in the Utah [caucus] was developed in Estonia, but for the Estonian elections, we use a different system due to the differences in the local infrastructure,“ Heiberg said. Namely, Estonia uses its ID-card infrastructure for secure authentication and digital signature purposes, while in Utah, all voters had to pre-register in order to be eligible to vote online.
The system has also been used in Chile, where eligible voters in the Maipu region were engaged in the budgetary decision making.
The Smartmatic-Cybernetica Centre for Excellence for Internet Voting was created in 2014 as a multidisciplinary centre of research and development. Its goal is to study and develop the process of voting over the Internet from all angles: social, political, organisational, procedural and technological.
Ted Cruz won the Utah caucus that was held on 22 March.
In 2005, Estonia became the first country in the world where people could vote online. As of now, every third person in the country votes online, without needing to go to a polling station.
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