Russia, Chile, Canada, Australia, France and Estonia have hosted the largest remote internet voting processes recorded to date. A look at their scale and, above all, how trustworthy each one was.
What was the largest internet vote in the world? The question is often answered too quickly and incorrectly, usually by looking only at one's own region. A proper answer requires looking beyond local borders and examining processes on different continents and in very different political contexts. This article reviews the six largest deployments of remote internet voting recorded so far and asks a question that matters just as much as scale: how trustworthy was each one?
First, a distinction that prevents confusion
Discussions of “electronic voting” often mix up two different things. The first is in-person electronic voting using voting machines (EVMs) inside polling places under the physical control of the electoral authority. The world's largest example is India, where nearly 986 million people voted using such machines in 2024, without an internet connection. The second is internet or remote voting (i-voting), where voters authenticate and cast their ballots from their own devices outside a controlled environment. This ranking deals exclusively with the second category, which is also the more debated one in terms of cybersecurity.
1. Russia (2024): the largest record and the most questioned
No other process in the world comes close to the scale reached by Russia in its March 2024 presidential election. Its Remote Electronic Voting system operated through two parallel platforms: a federal platform developed by Rostelecom, which recorded 4.4 million votes across 28 regions, and another independently administered by the city of Moscow, with an additional 3.6 million. In total, close to eight million people voted online in a single process, an unmatched figure worldwide. Scale, however, did not come with transparency: independent analysts have identified discrepancies—some of considerable magnitude—between official electoral commission records and the system's effective records, casting doubt on the integrity of the process. This record may nevertheless be short-lived. For the September 2026 State Duma election, the Russian electoral authority has already enabled internet voting for around 48.4 million eligible voters across 32 regions plus Moscow, the largest announced deployment of the mechanism in the country. If participation follows the pattern seen in 2024, it could exceed the current record.
2. Chile (2019): Latin America's largest milestone
The Municipal Citizen Consultation organised by the Chilean Association of Municipalities in December 2019 remains the largest internet voting experience recorded in the region. Of the 225 municipalities taking part, 29—including Santiago, Las Condes, Recoleta and San Miguel—used remote voting through EVoting's EParticipa platform, recording 1,055,044 valid ballots cast entirely online. Proportionally, this places Chile among the world's largest processes using this method.
3. Ontario, Canada (2018): one million votes without a common standard
Across Ontario's 2018 municipal elections, local processes offering internet voting recorded around one million digital ballots. Canada's distinctive feature is the absence of a single national system: each municipality hires its own technology provider and sets its own rules. This decentralisation has led specialists at Western University to warn about the lack of common security and audit standards across municipalities, in contrast with the scale of adoption.
4. New South Wales, Australia (2021): when demand exceeded the design
The iVote system was originally designed for a specific group: blind voters, voters with disabilities and people living in rural areas far from a polling place. During the December 2021 local elections, however, it was used at scale amid the pandemic and reached 671,657 votes. Demand exceeded the system's tested capacity by more than 100,000 ballots, causing an outage during critical voting hours and, according to a subsequent analysis, potentially changing the outcome of at least three closely contested local races. The New South Wales Parliament ultimately suspended its use for the 2023 state election.
5. France (2024): a digital route for citizens living abroad
France enables internet voting only for citizens living abroad, in consular and legislative elections. In the first round of the June 2024 legislative election, this electorate set a record with more than 410,000 digital ballots, well above the 250,000 recorded in 2022. It demonstrates how remote voting can address a genuine logistical problem with relative simplicity: delivering a ballot to someone who lives thousands of kilometres from their assigned consulate.
6. Estonia (2023): not the largest, but one of the most trusted
Estonia does not lead this ranking by volume, but it stands out for something harder to achieve: sustained trust over time. In its 2023 parliamentary election, digital ballots surpassed paper votes for the first time in the country's history, with 313,514 online votes representing 51.1% of participating voters. The system has been in continuous use for more than 15 years, publishes its source code for public audit and allows each voter to use a cryptographic code to verify that their ballot reached the election server intact. This combination—years of use, technical transparency and individual verification—has built its reputation, although international observers continue to debate whether the system provides full end-to-end verifiability, a discussion that remained open after the 2023 election.
Scale is not everything
In perspective, vote volume alone says little. The largest process on this list, Russia's, is also the one facing the greatest questions about its integrity, while Estonia has become a global reference through verifiability and open auditing despite its much smaller scale. The question that truly matters for the future of internet voting is not only how many people can vote this way, but how confidently they can know their ballot arrived exactly as it was cast.
