The Estonian government is digital. Â When banking, voting, contracts, and taxes are handled via the internet and authenticated by a national public key infrastructure, what does it matter where a person is located physically? Â
As noted in the article, online voting accounted for 24 percent of Estonia's votes in the last election, and votes were cast from 105 countries around the world.
There is also a flip-side to the fully digitized nature of the Republic of Estonia: having the bureaucratic machine of a country humming in the cloud increases the economic cost of a potential physical assault on the state. Rather than ceasing to operating in the event of an invasion, the government could boot up a backup replica of the digital state and host it in some other friendly European territory. Government officials would be quickly re-elected, important decisions made, documents issued, business and property records maintained, births and deaths registered, and even taxes filed by those citizens who still had access to the Internet.
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Lessons from the World’s Most Tech-Savvy Government – Global – The Atlantic
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Interesting article. Thanks for sharing it.