Expert: Online voting is possible in Latvia, but public trust in state IT systems must come first

The recurring question of why Estonians can vote online while Latvians cannot resurfaces around every election. According to IT solutions expert Edgars Jēkabsons, the usual answers — that it's banned by the constitution or simply too insecure — don't hold up fully.

No real legal barrier

Latvia's constitution requires parliamentary elections to be secret and free from fraud, but says nothing about the specific method of voting; that's governed by the ordinary Saeima Election Law, which parliament can amend by a simple vote. Latvia already treats voting without a commission present as constitutional — citizens abroad can vote by mail. Estonia's Supreme Court used similar reasoning in 2005 when it ruled online voting constitutional, noting that the ability to recast a vote protects against coercion. Latvia's own Saeima passed a law in 2022 allowing electronic advance voting in municipal referendums, in force since 2025.

Technology exists but isn't flawless

Estonia has run internet voting since 2005, when under two percent of voters used it; by the 2023 parliamentary election, more than half did. The system relies on encryption and mathematically verifiable steps, though international observers noted after the 2023 vote that full end-to-end verifiability still hasn't been achieved. The digital identity infrastructure Latvia would need — eID cards, eParaksts, Smart-ID — already exists.

Trust, not technology, is the obstacle

The real obstacle, the author argues, is public trust, badly shaken by a series of IT incidents: the vote-counting system failure on election night in June 2025, the ensuing criminal investigation and arrests in March 2026, an outage affecting the eParaksts digital signature service, and breaches of the State Forests and the Road Traffic Safety Directorate systems, the latter leaking data on roughly 1.2 million residents. As a result, votes in the 2026 Saeima election were again counted by hand.

The author proposes a gradual path: first overhaul government IT management and accountability, then introduce trusted automated vote counting, pilot electronic voting in a municipal referendum, and only then — with broad political consensus — extend e-voting to parliamentary elections, starting with citizens living abroad.