The Development of Remote E-Voting Around the World: A Review of Roads and Directions
Democracy and elections have more than 2.500 years of tradition. Technology has always influenced and shaped the ways elections are held. Since the emergence of the Internet there has been the idea of conducting remote electronic elections. In this paper
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Competence Center for Electronic Voting and Participation (E-Voting.CC) 2 Institute of IT-Security and Security Law (University of Passau) {r.krimmer,s.triessnig}@e-voting.cc, [email protected]
Abstract. Democracy and elections have more than 2.500 years of tradition. Technology has always influenced and shaped the ways elections are held. Since the emergence of the Internet there has been the idea of conducting remote electronic elections. In this paper we reviewed 104 elections with a remote e-voting possibility based on research articles, working papers and also on press releases. We analyzed the cases with respect to the level where they take place, technology, using multiple channels, the size of the election and the provider of the system. Our findings show that while remote e-voting has arrived on the regional level and in organizations for binding elections, on the national level it is a very rare phenomenon. Further paper based elections are here to stay; most binding elections used remote e-voting in addition to the paper channel. Interestingly, providers of e-voting systems are usually only operating in their own territory, as out-of-country operations are very rare. In the long run, for remote e-voting to become a reality of the masses, a lot has to be done. The high number of excluded cases shows that not only documentation is scarce but also the knowledge of the effects of e-voting is rare as most cases are not following simple experimental designs used elsewhere.
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Introduction
“While democracy must be more than [. . . ] elections, it is also true [. . . ] that it cannot be less,” [2] former Secretary General Kofi Annan once said. Elections are the core element of democracy as a society’s way to make decisions. Elections are the way to express how societies use technology and as new technologies have emerged and evolved, elections have changed accordingly. While there have been democratic structures in societies like India, the birthplace of democracy is attributed to old Athens in 507 BC [10]. From then on similar structures of direct democracy, bound by face-to-face societies, also developed in several places around the world like in ancient Rome [22], with the Vikings [32] or in the Cantons of Switzerland [34,19]. The next level of democracy developed with the creation of nation-states in the late 18th century with the need for representatives. This form of indirect democracy spread in three waves [24] from the United States and France around the globe to today’s predominant role of democracy as a rule of government. A. Alkassar and M. Volkamer (Eds.): VOTE-ID 2007, LNCS 4896, pp. 1–15, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
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R. Krimmer, S. Triessnig, and M. Volkamer
The political scientist Robert Dahl classifies these developments as the first and the second transformation of democracy [9]. With it, democracy moved away from the old ideal of identity of the ruler and the ruled. Thus, the worldwide decrease in voter turnout and the rapid development of information and com
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