Internet Voting

Internet Voting in the March 2007 Parliamentary Elections in Estonia

admin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:29:36 -0700

This study presents and analyzes the results of a survey among the electorate of the Estonian parliamentary elections held on 4 March 2007. The primary focus of the analysis lies on the newly introduced possibility of voting via the Internet in these elections. The application of this pioneering voting channel gave the elections an exclusive character and provoked enormous attention in the political as well as in the scientific community. The use of e-voting in the Estonian parliamentary elections is a remarkable world-première: for the first time an electorate could vote over the Internet in elections of a national parliament. Overall, 30.275 voters have used the possibility of e-voting, which corresponds to 5.4 percent of the participating voters.

Internet Voting in Estonia

admin — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:25:59 -0700

Several countries have conducted Internet voting trials in binding public elections over the past decade, including Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These trials have been conducted at the local and regional levels of government, targeting specific populations of voters. However, Estonia—a former Soviet republic and now a full member of the European Union—has advanced the farthest in deploying Internet voting. Since 2000, Estonia has conducted two national elections in which all voters could use Internet voting. The first election, in October 2005, was for local offices and the second election, in March 2007, was a national parliamentary election. In this article, we discuss the context for the Estonian experience in deploying Internet voting. We focus on how the Estonians have systematically addressed the legal and technical considerations required to make Internet voting a functioning voting platform, as well as the political and cultural framework that promoted this innovation. Using data from our own qualitative and quantitative studies of the Estonian experience, we consider who voted over the Internet in these elections, and the political implications of the voting platform. Finally, we consider the lessons that other countries can learn from the Estonian experience.

Preliminary Voting -- Prevoting

admin — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:56:51 -0700

We introduce the notion of preliminary voting, or pre-voting, wherein a voter deposits—perhaps over the Internet—a preliminary vote or prevote with election authorities at some time before the close of elections. Prevotes are not official votes, and need not be kept private; indeed, election officials might, as a matter of announced policy, publish the list of received prevotes together with the names of the voters submitting such prevotes. With prevoting, a voter must visit a polling site to make any ﬁnal adjustments to his prevote in private, and to actually cast her (perhaps modiﬁed) prevote.

Why Everything That Can Go Wrong Often Does: An Analysis of Election Administration Problems

admin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:37:18 -0700

Before the 2000 presidential election, few citizens in the United States paid much attention to election administration. But scholars have noted that election administration has been a problem for decades. Despite the attention paid to election administration in the research literature, most public policy efforts in since 2000 have been focused on purchasing new voting equipment and fixing problematic procedures, and not on resolving some of the underlying problems in the process of conducting elections in America. Our paper applies the logic of principal-agent theory to the problem of election administration, and analyzes problems in the conduct of elections from this perspective. We examine various components of the dominant method of voting in the United States—poll site voting—and use our principal-agent perspective to demonstrate that serious problems in the polling place environment could be resolved by other means of serving voters, especially vote-by-mail, early voting, and Internet voting.