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This October, Estonia announced that in the upcoming parliamentary elections in 2027, voters can use their mobile phones to cast their vote. This is something that is unheard of. No one has done this before, and this news got me thinking about democracy in general.
Most people will probably agree that a greater variety of options for casting a vote is going to increase inclusivity. We have examples of people living far enough from polling stations that getting there to cast a paper vote might be a problem. This applies to someone living in a rural area of Estonia or abroad. Being able to cast a vote over the internet was a great solution for that.
That doesn’t solve the whole problem, though. We still have some unique cases where even internet voting doesn’t help. It might be someone who doesn’t own a computer, or someone who is unable to get to a computer in a situation of crisis. For example, a person who is used to the compromise of not owning a computer but going to a local library to cast their vote online. Let’s imagine a situation involving a heavy storm or today’s quite common situation of a drone threat, where people are told to stay indoors for safety. Even in these cases, people still have the right to vote and make themselves heard.
These news stories about new voting options and reports of violent protests in multiple countries this autumn have got me thinking about democracy in general and the discourse that the state and its people should have with each other. It has made me wonder whether a solution like the Citizens’ Initiative Portal that we have in Estonia would be something that could help us internationally to preserve our democratic values and also give people the feeling that they have a voice that is heard by policymakers.
The Estonian Citizens’ Initiative Portal is celebrating its 10th birthday this year. The portal is a place where any citizen can start an initiative, basically a suggestion for policymakers, and other citizens can use their digital identities to give their support to this initiative. Once the support passes a certain threshold, the idea is sent to policymakers immediately.
It is a wonderful solution that first gives people a chance to show what they think under their own names. This is not an anonymous solution. This is also not a moderated solution. Everyone has the right to say what they think under their own name, and no one is deciding or filtering which initiatives should be published. Instead, it is a self-regulating environment where a well-prepared initiative has a greater chance of gaining support from others than one that is just an emotional jumble of words that are not grammatically correct and that doesn’t offer any solutions.
It’s interesting to look back at the last 10 years of this initiative and see what topics people care about. The issues that matter to people are often more enduring than topics that come and go with trends. We can see that the biggest points of discussion on this portal are matters that take years to resolve, and the portal is a perfect place to maintain a continuous discussion on specific aspects of broader topics. Let me give you a few examples.
In 2018, two years after the launch of the portal, the first major initiative was introduced. It focused on reducing the use of oil shale in Estonian energy production. Now, this discussion is much bigger than our efforts to move towards greener energy. It involves an entire region of the country, the industry that operates there, and thousands of people who earn their income from it. So, naturally, this must be a broader discussion, not just a single policy related to sustainability, and people from that region have the right to make themselves heard.
The result of this initiative in 2018 was that, in 2021, the Parliament adopted a new strategy, Estonia 2035, which is a comprehensive strategy covering our sustainability efforts, not only with regard to oil shale but across all areas of green and renewable energy. This new policy was informed by a discussion that people themselves started in 2018.
We have another example. In 2019, more than 6,000 people gave their signatures in support of banning fur farms. We saw the results of this initiative in 2021, when fur farms were prohibited in Estonia.
A third and final example. In 2020, we saw an initiative that gathered more than 35,000 signatures. The initiative proposed that Estonia should modify its Family Law Act to allow same-sex couples to register their marriage. This initiative was incredibly popular compared to the year before, when the record was just over 6,000 signatures. This represented a change that was nearly six times greater.
We saw the results of this initiative unfold in 2023, when the Family Law Act was amended to use gender-neutral language when referring to marriage, which in turn allows same-sex couples to register their marriages officially.
People have become more active with years and these days the signatuure count of a successful initiative is getting close to six figures.
The last example was one of the first initiatives to tackle a topic where public debate was incredibly emotional and heated. In cases like these, people need an outlet to express their frustrations. I think a portal like this is a much better place for that than social media, where people can remain anonymous and feel that their words have no consequences, or on the streets, where one malicious act can create an avalanche of aggression and harm.
Just after the violent protests in France, I had a discussion with a French journalist and asked him whether an official online outlet would have prevented the chaos and kept the discussion focused on the quality of education and schools, where everything had started in the first place. He told me that it would not have made a difference, as they had already had petitions with millions of signatures before, yet political decisions had remained unchanged regardless.
At the same time, the Estonian experience shows that even if these citizen initiatives are not accepted immediately or in their original form, they can still have a lasting impact. These initiatives, supported by thousands of signatures, become valuable input when political parties begin drafting their election programmes. They also serve as a way to filter out populism, as they reveal which ideas people are actually willing to support under their own names. This creates a very different picture from the one we see in the anonymous space of social media. Estonia’s neighbours to the north and south have similar solutions. Finns and Latvians understand the benefits of making themselves heard through online channels.
Getting back to online voting, which I mentioned at the beginning, I believe participation should be as simple as possible. Looking at the world today, I think that productive public debate is what we need most between elections. We need as many people as possible to make their opinions heard. I hope we are going to see more and more versions of online citizens’ initiative portals.
