Estonia's e-voting system wasn't attacked during election - Electoral Committee

Photo: .

The Estonian National Electoral Committee said in its answer to an inquiry from the opposition Center Party that no attacks against the online voting system took place during the Riigikogu elections of 2011.

In its request for information the Center Party wanted to be provided copies of the log files of the e-voting server. The committee said the fails have not been preserved.

The Local Elections Act requires that personal data of voters contained in the system of e-voting must be deleted. Consequently, log files can be preserved on the condition that voting data which can be personalized has been deleted in the files.

To a request of the Center Party that the e-voting software used in the 2011 election be made available to it for testing the National Electoral Committee responded that the e-voting software is property of the state which isn't distributed for free and that to the software's source code and the documents describing it a restriction on access applies pursuant to the Public Information Act.

The National Electoral Committee added that for all the elections where e-voting took place it has commissioned an audit of the process of e-voting. In 2011 the audit of e-voting was conducted by KPMG, which did not identify any circumstances that would have jeopardized the integrity and confidentiality of e-voting. Besides all procedures of e-voting were open to observers.

The Center Party on Monday sent the National Electoral Committee a request for information asking whether attacks were committed against the e-voting server during the 2011 elections and requesting to see the server's log files for the said period.