Estonia's e-governance revolution is hailed as a voting success – so why are some US states pulling in the opposite direction?

Through the Estonian government's e-services, which include digital options for voting, paying taxes, storing identification, and more, the country saved roughly €280 million over the span of a decade thanks to the lower cost of collecting digital signatures.

Residents who participated in Michigan’s first year of early in-person voting say they appreciated the shorter lines, the convenience to vote on their own schedules, and the ability to feed their ballots into polling place tabulators themselves. Nearly 4,600 voters cast their ballots early in-person across the state.

GARViS, Georgia’s new system for documenting voter records, stores information on roughly 7 million active voters and hundreds of thousands of inactive voters, including their addresses, assigned polling places, sample ballots, and early voting schedules. The George Secretary of State’s Office reports that the new system has helped cut down check-in time on election day from about a minute and a half per voter to about 47 seconds per voter, streamlining the process for both poll workers and residents.

Feedback machines installed at government offices such as hospitals and police stations allow Ugandan citizens to offer anonymous thoughts on the quality of the services provided, creating data that is analyzed to highlight areas for improvement. More than 50 machines have been deployed throughout the country with nearly 260,000 people sharing feedback each month in Kampala alone.

In Oregon, voters are automatically registered when they get their driver's license, and voters are automatically sent a ballot when election time comes. The state had the highest turnout rate in the country in the 2022 midterm election, with 61.5% of eligible citizens casting a ballot.

The Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability's "deliberative town halls" pair willing lawmakers with a random, representative sample of constituents so voters can share feedback and ask questions without being drowned out by the loudest voices in political spaces. All participants are given the same background materials created by a nonpartisan source to inform their discussion, which means there's no squabbling over establishing basic facts, and politicians must adapt to the natural flow of conversation rather than relying on canned talking points.

Los Angeles County’s Flex Vote Center Program establishes polling locations at shelters, transitional housing sites, and service centers for people who are unhoused or face other barriers to voting. In 2020, nearly 2,800 people cast their ballots through the Flex program.

To assuage concerns around election security, Ada County, Ohio created an online tool called Ballot Verifier that allows users to search every ballot cast in the county since 2022. County officials invited local election skeptics to be the first to test the new tool and received positive feedback on its level of transparency.

After Michiganders approved a constitutional amendment allowing residents to vote early in federal and statewide elections, municipal clerks reported that the state’s first test of early voting in November 2023 was a success with nearly 4,600 people casting ballots.

Following violent disruption during campus elections in 2021, Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, implemented an electronic voting process which allowed students to cast their ballots online via a university portal. Some students who had previously abstained from participating in elections due to safety concerns were able to vote, but the platform also experienced technical glitches and fears around cyberattacks, which left some students unable to cast their ballots.