Hayden Szeto in front of the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral as he walks through the streets of Tallin Old Town on Monday, Nov. 21, 2016 in Tallinn, Estonia.
That state-issued number works alongside a personal identification number chosen by each citizen. The two, together, form a lock and key relationship, authenticating one another. You log into the system with your state ID number and your PIN. Result: there's no question of whether someone should be disqualified because of a dubious signature discrepancy. Instead, an individual uses their secret PIN with their state ID number to verify who they are. "In the sense of your PIN number, that's your digital signature," said Kodar.
It's the sort of thing that works in a close-knit country like Estonia, where the threat of Russian aggression is a uniting factor, but would likely be met with skepticism in the United States, in part because Kremlin propaganda has already had succeeded in driving wedges between so many citizens and their government and, in many cases, between citizens and reality.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials have taken some steps to prevent vote counts from being manipulated. A new National Cyber Strategy allows the Pentagon to conduct advanced reconnaissance on Russian networks and quickly retaliate for a massive attack like the 2007 one on Estonia.