Before people start praising Estonia for its e-voting system, which inevitably happens on such stories, let me remind you that the system was indeed open to compromise:
So remember that even with hardware tokens used in electronic voting, which are supposed to be much more secure than using other forms of authentication, you still run the risk of having the election compromised, especially since an election is something important enough that more than one major country could be interested in manipulating at any given time.
It's not like the "well, I'm nobody, so why would the NSA/other spy agency target me?!" situation at all. We're talking about the decision of who gets to run a whole country, and sophisticated adversaries will be very interested in influencing that if it can serve their interests.
We know China hacks tons of countries, we know Russia has been meddling with all sorts of elections lately, and we also know that for the past 70 years the USA has interfered in about one election per year, on average. This is not just theoretical stuff that would never happen. And I'm sure there are many Middle-Eastern and other Asian countries interested in influencing their rivals' elections, too.
Came here to post this, their ID system sounded like the greatest thing ever until...
It's a monoculture, and therefore extra brittle and subject to attacks. If a country is gonna go all in on a single solution, it had better be a tried-and-true one.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/estonias-id-card-scrisis-how-e...
The timeline may also match the hack the GCHQ and NSA did against the Estonian e-ID provider, Gemalto:
https://theintercept.com/2015/02/19/great-sim-heist/
So remember that even with hardware tokens used in electronic voting, which are supposed to be much more secure than using other forms of authentication, you still run the risk of having the election compromised, especially since an election is something important enough that more than one major country could be interested in manipulating at any given time.
It's not like the "well, I'm nobody, so why would the NSA/other spy agency target me?!" situation at all. We're talking about the decision of who gets to run a whole country, and sophisticated adversaries will be very interested in influencing that if it can serve their interests.
We know China hacks tons of countries, we know Russia has been meddling with all sorts of elections lately, and we also know that for the past 70 years the USA has interfered in about one election per year, on average. This is not just theoretical stuff that would never happen. And I'm sure there are many Middle-Eastern and other Asian countries interested in influencing their rivals' elections, too.
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/americas-long-histor...