User:Oceanflynn/Tarvi Martens

Tarvi Martens is head of Estonia's Internet Voting and chair of the Estonian Electronic Voting Committee, a system that allows voters to cast ballots in pan-national elections through a "secure online portal system" using "innovative ID cards and a special card reader," that became operational in 2005. Estonia was the "first country in the world to have nation-wide local elections where people could cast binding votes over the internet. Martens was described in a 2017 The New Yorker article as the "putative grandfather of Estonia’s digital platform." He noted that X-Road architects had "turned to democratic ideals for guidance."

Career
From 2002 through 2015 Martens worked at the Certification Centre in Tallinn, Estonia. He was Project Manager for Internet Voting with Estonian National Electoral Committee

from 2003 to 2012. From December 2012 to December 2016, he served as Chair of the Tallinn-based Estonian Electronic Voting Committee in Tallinn.

According to a 2016 report by the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, Tarvi Martens was the visionary behind the Estonian Electronic Voting Committee. Estonia, tagged the "Digital Republic" by the The New Yorker, launched e-Estonia in 2017 to improve interactions between citizens and government through electronic solutions. Leon Lukashevsky, a 2017 Code for Canada Fellow, a Federal Fellowship with the Canadian Digital Service (CDS) and Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC), noted that X-Road architects had "turned to democratic ideals for guidance." In an interview with Forbes, Martens described how Estonia's system, which was the first in the world, has grown so that "over 30% of votes cast in the last several elections" were done online. Lukashevsky described the process behind the creation of e-Estonia, and its underlying digital platform X-Road, which is rooted in a blockchain, as democratically-driven.

Background
A June 7, 2017 Forbes' article,