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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
🗳 Elections in Diia? What’s really standing in the way — and five steps that need to be taken right now
At the end of August I recorded a podcast with the Strimco team — people who build government digital products.
We spent an hour unpacking one question: can you vote in Diia? 📲
Not “when are the elections.” About the homework that needs to be done regardless of the date.
1️⃣ Arithmetic
🌍 According to Vodafone, roughly 5,2 million people are constantly abroad.
🏫 The number of polling stations where, by law, you can vote abroad is 104.
📋 The voter register has been updated by 45 thousand changes since January. It is not integrated with the exit database, the death register, or data on those who turned 18.
💥 393 polling stations have been destroyed, and about another thousand need to be restored.
And the main thing — the military. 🪖
More than a million voters in uniform. That’s about 10% of the vote.
🌍No example in the world — neither Lincoln-era USA nor World War II — answers how the military votes during an active phase of war.
🇬🇧Britain simply didn’t hold elections for ten years.
We won’t have that option: after the ceasefire the army will demobilize slowly, and elections will still have to be held.
2️⃣ Why the main risk isn’t even hackers. 👨💻
IT people say: electronically held elections are technically possible. For oversight, involve entities like the OSCE and the European Commission in the cybersecurity commission.
The problem is different.
🔐 The secrecy of the vote upends the whole logic.
You need to simultaneously identify the citizen and anonymize their vote — no ready-made tool does that.
🇳🇴 Norway abandoned online voting 10 years ago not because of a hack, but because of the risk of mass …vote-buying. Like in dormitories.
🏠 Any remote voting removes secrecy: husband and wife in the kitchen are more likely to vote the same way.
⏰ Plus turnout for online elections is often lower than for regular ones: “I’ll vote at 23:59” turns into “I forgot.”
⚠️ And another problem — legitimacy.
One bug in Diia on election day — and it’s no longer a bug, it’s “they stole the election.”
And the side that loses will challenge the result. Even Estonia is debating whether to abandon it.
➕ And a bunch of technical questions like who administers the online ballot — the question is no longer technical.
👉 For now (unless something better is invented) the compromise limit is: voting itself at the polling station, in the booth. 🗳
Everything around it — the register, counting, observation — is digital, with logging like in Prozorro.
📱 Online — only for certain categories, as France, Switzerland, and Armenia do for diplomats.
3️⃣ So what to do right now 🛠
The problem isn’t technology. The problem is that nothing is being done.
There are two options:
🤦♂️ the classic for our convocation — cobble a law together at the last minute out of s*** and sticks;
or
⚙️ start preparing now in advance without knowing when the elections will be and NOT crafting a law for a specific candidate.
Infrastructure outside of Diia takes at least six months to a year.
So here are 5️⃣ steps that don’t depend on the election date at all:
▪️ 📋 The register. Updates through Diia and integrations — exit, death, coming of age, consular registration. That’s law and donor funding.
▪️ 🌍🪖 Abroad and the military. A law on polling stations outside consulates and separate accounting for military personnel. Several options, agreed with the CEC and partners, who will later recognize the result.
▪️ 💻 Digital where it’s safe. Counting, observation, the register. Online — only for certain categories.
▪️ 🧪 Experiments where the cost of error is low. Voting for housing councils, petitions, participatory budgets, condominiums — to build trust in the tool.
🏛 And we need to answer the political fork-in-the-road questions that everyone is hiding from. Residency census, participation of former members of pro-Russian parties, system, order of elections.
⏳ Right now two things are missing for that: a deadline and political will.
And I’ll remind you, elections are not the voting day.
🗓 They are 60–90 days of campaign.
📋 It’s the register.
🪖 It’s a million people in uniform.
🌍 It’s five million abroad.
If you prepare “when they say” — there will be a law cobbled together overnight, and a result half the country will not recognize.
👉 The homework must be done before anyone even starts thinking about elections)
https://youtu.be/Zk5QF1ZHzZo?si=xKiX9oQjpOTOh_IO
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