Estonia has had e-voting via computers since 2005. Now with the upcoming elections, an Estonian citizen will be able to vote on their mobile phone via an app. I argue, this time, it will increase voter turnover, which the first e-voting version didn’t do.

David Oks wrote a fantastic article on how the positions for bank tellers did not decrease after ATM rollout, but actually saw a substantial fall after banks introduced their own apps. There’s plausibility it will do the same to voter turnover. If you remove most of the friction towards voting, from the moment of having a candidate in mind and casting a ballot, you will remove the excuses of not going to a voting booth or find a computer and install specialised voting software on it.

Now you will only need an up-to-date reputable brand phone with a trusted app store. Same requirements that most banking apps require. Looking at the current state after last mobile voting testing, there doesn’t seem to be any specialised app for each election like with computer versions, but rather install it once. That seriously removes a lot of the friction, but at the same time, I worry it may be an attack surface, if left installed on device to linger.

In light of all the troubling news of AI agents easily finding zero-day vulnerabilities, I hope that the upcoming parliament election for e-voting will go smoothly without big hindrances. It might be a make-or-break moment.