Society must be ready for online voting – Estonian president after meeting Grybauskaitė

“I always tell my partners that a country should never start digitalizing its society from the voting system. You need to have a system where, first of all, you guarantee checking the identity of people and guarantee some simple services where people simply can apply for social security system or register children to school, so that the society starts to change, starts to grow into a digital model where it starts to trust digital but also learns to protect digital,” Kaljulaid said at a joint news conference of the Lithuanian and Estonian presidents in Tallinn on Monday.

She expressed certitude that online voting would become usual sooner or later.

Estonia is so far the only European country that allows online voting during all elections since 2005.

Meanwhile, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė said that online voting could not yet guarantee security and anonymity.

“Democratic societies are supposed to guarantee anonymity, security and reliability. At least in our understanding today, these elements cannot be 100 percent guaranteed because of security threats and cyber threats that we see today,” Grybauskaitė told Tallinn journalists.

The Lithuanian president noted that some European countries had been testing e-voting possibilities for a decade and finally discarded the method as unreliable and unsafe.

“We are not saying ‘never’ but we need to be more cautious,” she said.