Nepal's Election Commission says it will move toward internet voting

What happened

The commission held a presentation, a technology demonstration and an interaction programme on internet voting and on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in election management. Epardafas reported that the company Smartmatic gave a live demonstration of an internet voting system, covering voter verification, ballot casting, secure vote management and system operation. Its experts joined from the Netherlands, Estonia, Bosnia, Panama and the United Kingdom. Sanjay Khanal of Inspiring Lab also presented on system architecture.

Election Commissioner Rajib Subba said the commission and other agencies must first map the ICT skills and staff they already have. He listed the areas of expertise needed: digital identity, voter authentication, data exchange, cybersecurity, system development, infrastructure and operations. He described internet voting as a system that involves many agencies, not only the commission.

According to Epardafas, more than 24 ICT heads and representatives of state agencies attended. They included the Department of National ID and Civil Registration, the Department of Passports, the Department of Immigration and Nepal Police. Under-Secretary Anup Neupane briefed participants on the commission's current ICT systems and planned upgrades. Discussion covered digital identity, interoperability between systems, data exchange, cybersecurity and data protection.

The engineering behind it

Internet voting must meet two goals that pull against each other. The system must prove that each vote comes from an eligible voter, and that each voter votes only once. At the same time, nobody, including the system's own operators, should be able to link a vote back to the person who cast it. This is a general problem in security engineering, and it is the reason internet voting is studied so carefully.

Estonia, often used as the reference case, shows one design. According to a European Commission case study, Estonian voters log in with a national ID card, mobile ID or digital ID. The vote is encrypted and digitally signed on the voter's device. One server receives it and passes it to a storage server, which removes double votes. Before counting, the signature is removed, and an offline application decrypts and counts the votes with the system's private key.

This design is like a double envelope. The outer envelope, the signature, shows who voted. The inner envelope, the encryption, hides how they voted. The two are separated before the count. The design depends on public key infrastructure (PKI), the system of key pairs and certificates that lets computers prove identity and sign data.

Such a design also depends on things outside the voting software. Estonia's study lists a national electronic ID used by most people, a secure data exchange layer between government databases, and up-to-date population records. This is why Subba's list started with digital identity and data exchange. Without trusted identity and clean records, even well-written voting software cannot know who is allowed to vote.

What it means in Nepal

The main reason for the work is voting from abroad. The Kathmandu Post reported in August 2026 that the Supreme Court ordered the government on 23 March 2018 to make arrangements for Nepalis outside the country to vote. A study in 2010-11 put the number of Nepalis abroad at nearly 4 million, and they now live in about 170 countries. The arrangements were not ready for the March 2026 elections, because of lack of time, no enabling law, and electronic systems that had not been tested enough.

On 12 August the commission formed two committees. One, led by commissioner Guru Prasad Wagle, reviews the legal framework. The other, led by Subba, assesses IT infrastructure, digital security, logistics and voting methods. Its members include technical officials from the Foreign Ministry, the Integrated Data Management Centre and the Cyber Bureau of Nepal Police. Options studied include physical ballots, postal voting and secure electronic voting.

Parliament must still pass the law that would allow voter registration abroad and electronic ballots. The Post reported that a first test could come in the November 2027 provincial elections, under proportional representation, if the law passes in time, starting with countries that have many Nepali residents and working diplomatic missions.

Estonia gives a sense of scale and of limits. The European Commission study reports that internet votes made up 30.5 percent of votes in Estonia's 2015 parliamentary election, cast from 116 countries. Online voting there is open only during the seven days of advance voting, which leaves time to remove double votes before election day. The same study lists barriers that any new system has to address: some parties distrust online voting, some citizens distrust internet transactions, and some voters lack computer skills.