Coming up on March 4th, Estonians will hold the world's first vote over the internet. According to Reuters, E-voting will be introduced for a parliamentary election for the first time after it was used in more limited
local elections in 2005. It is a fresh sign of Estonia's strong
embrace of technology since it quit the Soviet Union in 1991 and another example of its innovative culture.
Estonia pioneered a flat tax in 1992, is paying women to have babies in order to stem its declining population and built the world's first free city-wide wifi network in its capital city Tallinn. Estonians were some of the first to use online banking 10 years ago even though many of its residents didn't have ready access to the internet or much money.
The tiny Baltic country's infrastructure was decrepit after its independence in the early 1990's. Even today, outside the glitzy new skyscrapers of Tallinn city center, buildings look battered, roads are potholed and Soviet-era trolley buses still whirr around town.
"One of the most common explanations as to why Estonians have taken to new IT technology is that everything had to be done new here," said Jaan Tallinn, a senior programmer involved in the development of Skype.
"There were no legacies to deal with, like with bank cheques, which were already obsolete. So companies could create new systems and people just used them," he added.
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