Norway Internet voting has high turnout - even on Sunday!

The chief of voting operations for Norway has just filed his first report to a closed group on Linkedin, "Internet voting." Any Linkedin member can join. Here’s what he said:

Christian Bull:
"Internet voting has been ongoing since August 10, and ends on friday. Going extremely well so far - we've already exceeded my own expectations in i-participation, and yesterday was our busiest day yet. Turns out people really want to vote on sunday evenings. :)"

Here's the link to his original plan for the Internet voting system (on pdf):

Transparency and Technical Measures to Establish Trust in Norwegian


Follow up report by IFES

Ben Goldsmith, IFES Election Expert, was part of a team of international observers of the Norway Internet voting trial.

In a September 27, 2011 IFES Report he writes, “Overall turnout for municipal elections across Norway was 63.8 percent, and a little lower in pilot municipalities at 62.3 percent. The use of Internet votes in pilot municipalities was high considering it was the first time that Norway had used the Internet for elections, with approximately 25 percent of voters in pilot municipalities using the Internet to cast a vote.” A complete report will come out in 2012.

(The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) is an election system transparency and integrity watch dog organization.)

UPDATE 6-18-12
To assess and draw valuable lessons that can be applied across the globe, IFES produced three reports evaluating specific aspects of this voting pilot program at the request of the Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development. These reports were released to the public by the Norwegian government on June 12.