During the coronavirus pandemic, which is still ongoing in our country, we have witnessed an increasingly strong digital connectivity in all structures of society. The school system has been conducted and is still partially being conducted online and via television, various communication platforms have greatly facilitated communication and the continuation of business for companies, and social networks have served to connect people more strongly both in the country and around the world. We have witnessed the digitalization of small producers and family farms, who had not utilized the internet and its advantages in their business before this pandemic. Public administration has largely functioned digitally.
With the internet, almost everything is possible. Even holding elections within your organization, society, or association, voting, and choosing.
While Estonia, often highlighted in the media as an example, has been voting online for its representatives in government bodies since 2005, Croatia has not made much progress in this regard. Although there were indications and some political options in Croatia suggested that due to the pandemic, this year’s parliamentary elections should be held electronically, they will be held in a way that requires us to go to polling stations, but under special conditions.
Although he notes that their electronic voting system was not initially designed for conducting elections at the local or state level, Ivan Hendija and his company IDE3 from Zagreb created the e-voting system FairVotes last year. As he says, it has been successfully used by several associations, unions, and societies to date, and recently the HNS held internal party elections using their e-voting system.
– We created FairVotes at a time when one of our clients faced challenging preparations for voting within their organization. We sat down and agreed to create a system that would enable them to do so. At that time, we did not even consider that we would create it in such a way that it could actually serve everyone, and that is what we ultimately achieved by refining and improving it. The client was truly satisfied because they significantly reduced voting costs, had immediate results, and could track voter turnout. That is when we realized that our system could be beneficial to others and offered it to the market – explains Hendija who founded his IT company 12 years ago and digitalization is his favorite area of work.
– I believe that everything you can simplify, you should. We are all constantly on laptops, tablets, mobile phones, computers, we are constantly connected. Why not use that and safely, quickly, and easily conduct, for example, the election for the best journalist of the year, as the Croatian Journalists’ Society did last year using our system. Among others, besides the HND, our system is also used in MENSA, we recently provided it to the Rijeka Business School PAR, and last Sunday, the HNS conducted internal party elections using FairVotes. It is truly designed to serve everyone with the highest security measures, minimal cost, guaranteed transparency, and without environmental pollution – which I also consider important – says Hendija.
The advantage of voting this way, Hendija continues, is that the organizer can create ‘ballot’ according to their needs, and each person can vote only once, ensuring transparency. At any moment, the organizer can know who responded to the voting and appropriately remind them of the elections they are conducting. Voting can be initiated through the application in a minute, and it is intended that the system can be used by everyone, from representatives of residents in an apartment building to the state level.
