For the last 4 elections (from about 2005 or so) we (Estonians) have been able to vote electronically from the privacy of our own homes using our national ID card.  It really is rather convenient and helps to increase voter turnout. Since the current (local elections) are not finished yet it’s not clear how many of the votes were given electronically but at the moment it’s more than 60000 votes. This is a rather large percentage considering that the whole population of this country is about 1.5 million and voter turnout on the last local elections was a bit over 500 000.

Anyway what I really wanted to talk about is the e-voting support for Linux, that really managed to surprise me in a positive way. The Linux binary of the voting app has been available since the beginning, but a couple of months ago when we had elections for the European Parliament I discovered that this binary was only available for 32 bit Linux and I couldn’t get it running on 64 bit Linux even in the 32 bit compatibility mode. So I sent a complaint letter to the Election Board and used a Windows machine for voting. I really didn’t expect that they will get it fixed in a couple of months, even though it probably only needed recompiling for amd64 target. But they did and the new 64 bit Linux election app actually worked fine and was half the size of the old one even though the old one was dynamically linked and the new one is statically linked.

I guess it’s now time to ask for FreeBSD support and insist that they open source it 🙂