Free to Choose: E-voting, Infrastructure and the Origins of Estonia’s Digital Republic

Abstract

In the 2000s, Estonia’s self-avowedly neoliberal government institutionalised voting over the internet, becoming the only country in the world to use online voting in national elections. This innovation was branded as a key component of Estonia’s ‘digital republic’, articulated as an alternative to the bulky welfare state as well as to Soviet authoritarianism. This article suggests that by focusing on the sociotechnical infrastructure that underpinned the e-voting project, specifically the Estonian digital ID, we can reframe the history of post-Cold War development. It argues that reforms of post-Soviet state institutions were driven by a fragile coalition of civil servants, looking for ways to accomplish new challenges under serious budgetary constraints, computer engineers, who shared an ethos of experimentation developed at the Soviet-era Institute of Cybernetics, and banks, who offloaded their R&D initiatives to the state. This coalition was fraught with conflict, did not last long and had no singular goal – and thus could later be framed as a victory for democratic reform as well as another example of state capture by private interests. Further, the infrastructural basis of e-voting helps explain how Estonian policymakers could defend the institutions against criticisms that prevented its widespread adoption elsewhere.