Voting is a serious business. Some say it is an honour. Some say it is a civic duty.
Some people take it even more seriously than that.
Not everyone would agree with such a weighty statement but few would dispute that voting is important and necessary for the proper function of democracy. In this age of unprecedented access to information, however, fewer and fewer people choose to make the trek to the polls on election day. Even in countries where the citizens have had the right to vote freely for a relatively short period of time, the percentage of people voting in elections is dropping. And that is why the Estonian government announced this week that it plans to implement an online voting infrastructure in time for the 2004 general election in that country. After Estonia regained its independence in 1991, voting numbers were high but they plummeted in the last general election in 1999.