In three decades since regaining independence from the Soviet Union, Estonia has taken government from “click here” to one-click to, in some cases, zero-click operation. Citizens can file their national taxes online in minutes, zip through signing up for services without dealing with paper forms, and even vote online thanks to digital identities created for them within minutes of their birth.

But while this experiment in digital citizenship offers useful lessons for larger countries than this Baltic state of 1.3 million, one of the biggest may be: Don’t try this at home.

Estonian officials made two points over and over during a press trip to their country that I took in mid-August, with the country’s government covering most of the cost: This e-government journey made sense for a nation of its size, but bigger and more complex countries should not assume they could take the same path. Or as President Kersti Kaljulaid said in one meeting with participants: “Copy nobody in this digital transformation.”

Minimum viable e-government
Estonia’s first distinguishing factor was starting anew in 1991 after decades of Soviet occupation as an independent country without legacy legal systems worth maintaining, but also without much money.

“We had to make the rules from scratch,” said Prime Minister Kaja Kallas in another meeting during the trip.

The first service the government tried to digitize—the minimum viable product of this transformation—was taxes. Letting citizens inspect and correct tax returns online with their own information already incorporated made this faster for both the state and taxpayers.

“Tax attorneys are out of a job here because, of course, one reason is that our tax system is very simple, but the other reason is that it is very transparent, and all is prefilled by the state,” Kallas said.

But supporting these exchanges of data between public and private sectors also led the government to create and issue smart-card digital IDs to ease the required authentication. At first, Kaljulaid said, people saw few uses for these IDs. That changed when the government opened this identity system to private firms for verifying new customers: “They didn’t only have to sign in twice or three times a year when they had to communicate with government,” she said.

These IDs are now available not just as smart cards but as digital and mobile IDs. Citizens can use them for digital signatures and even to vote online—an option introduced in 2005, and which 44% of Estonians used in 2019.

(When I attempted to explain to our hosts what my own experience as a poll worker in Virginia taught me about the importance of paper ballots, they seemed a little amused at our devotion to analog rituals.)

Threats and transparency
Estonia’s digital infrastructure saw its most serious challenge in 2007, when Russian hackers broke into numerous systems and caused extensive disruption. The digital ID system has seen more recent attacks, including a breach this summer of some 300,000 document photos and a vulnerability found in the circuitry of physical ID cards in 2017 that required blocking the digital certificates of about 760,000 of them.

The government has reacted by pushing information-security research and development—and by moving to secure government databases against tampering with what it calls the world’s first implementation of blockchain technology.

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