> anything less than perfect is broken
Why?
Even without getting into complex election fraud, parties in many countries already know how to buy votes in a paper-ballot system: you simply offer a bottle of vodka for a cell-phone photo of the ballot marked the way you want.
And even without that, there's a much simpler calculation in play in Estonia. Keskerakond (the party closely allied with Putin's party), only got 7.7% of the e-votes in the most recent election: the demographics of online voters has very little overlap with their supporters. If only the paper-based votes were counted, Keskerakond would have won the election.
Sure, they'd still have the complication of actually forming a government; but it's much more likely they'd be able to do that with a first-place showing (and possibly without Savisaar).
With those sorts of numbers, if I were a Keskerakond strategist, I'd be doing everything I possibly could to discredit e-voting too. And the more "useful idiots" I could find, who'll merrily interfere in the elections a country they know very little about because it suits their own ideals, the better.
Why?
Even without getting into complex election fraud, parties in many countries already know how to buy votes in a paper-ballot system: you simply offer a bottle of vodka for a cell-phone photo of the ballot marked the way you want.
And even without that, there's a much simpler calculation in play in Estonia. Keskerakond (the party closely allied with Putin's party), only got 7.7% of the e-votes in the most recent election: the demographics of online voters has very little overlap with their supporters. If only the paper-based votes were counted, Keskerakond would have won the election.
Sure, they'd still have the complication of actually forming a government; but it's much more likely they'd be able to do that with a first-place showing (and possibly without Savisaar).
With those sorts of numbers, if I were a Keskerakond strategist, I'd be doing everything I possibly could to discredit e-voting too. And the more "useful idiots" I could find, who'll merrily interfere in the elections a country they know very little about because it suits their own ideals, the better.