The country of Estonia may not be known for its world-leading innovations, but their new online-only voting system has been put up for review and is winning praise around the world for its new level of transparency.

Estonia announced the world’s first nationwide Internet-based voting system last year, now they have put up the source code online in an attempt to assuage critics’ concerns.

Tarvi Martens, chairman of Estonia's Electronic Voting Committee, said “The idea, which was the result of joint discussion between numerous Estonian IT experts and the Electronic Voting Committee, was implemented today. We welcome the fact that experts representing civil society want to contribute to the development and security of the e-elections... this is the next step toward a transparent system.” 

Estonia has had an advanced national ID card system in place since 2007, wherein citizens are given a single card for most of the government registrations and licences; it is digitally encoded with a raft of personal files and information. The country has been rolling out digital voting over the last few years; in the 2009 elections for the European Parliament 15 percent of all votes cast were submitted online, that number grew to almost 25 percent for the 2011 domestic parliamentary elections.

In an attempt to let anyone with fears over security or the risk of rorting in the new age voting system, the Estonian government has posted a copy of the script online.

Tarvi Martens says, "We are not releasing the client-side because that would make creation of fake clients too easy, and we are implementing procedures to prove that released code is actually used in real election servers."