A few weeks ago, I was on a call with a founder I’ve interviewed before. He told me the story of a woman in New York City who has lived there for 17 years. She has three kids and badly wants to come home in October and vote – but she’s afraid to do so. Not of the flight itself, but of getting stuck here if the war flares up again before she can get back to her children.

It’s the same calculation that half a million Israelis abroad are being asked to make this year, because Israel is one of the few democracies in the world that doesn’t allow citizens overseas to cast an absentee ballot. If you want to vote in what may be the most consequential election in the country’s history (the first since October 7), you don’t get to do it from London, or New York, or wherever you’ve built a life.

You either get on a plane, or you don’t vote at all.

The founder I was speaking to was Shai Bargil, CEO of Sequent. This Israeli company develops cryptographically verifiable online voting systems that are already used in elections in Canada and Europe.

“One of the hardest topics we’re currently talking about,” he told me, “is overseas voting. When governments start with us on digital voting, they typically start with a specific population [like] overseas citizens, people with disabilities, sometimes the elderly.”

Later this year, Canada will use its secure cryptographic system to verify 208,000 registered........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)