Electronic voting


Electronic voting is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or take care of casting and counting ballots including voting time.

Depending on the particular implementation, e-voting may use standalone electronic voting machines (also called EVM) or computers connected to the Internet (online voting). It may encompass a range of Internet services, from basic transmission of tabulated results to full-function online voting through common connectable household devices. The degree of automation may be limited to marking a paper ballot, or may be a comprehensive system of vote input, vote recording, data encryption and transmission to servers, and consolidation and tabulation of election results.[citation needed]

A worthy e-voting system must perform most of these tasks while complying with a set of standards established by regulatory bodies, and must also be capable to deal successfully with strong requirements associated with security, accuracy, integrity, swiftness, privacy, auditability, accessibility, cost-effectiveness, scalability and ecological sustainability trustworthiness inclusive.[citation needed]

Electronic voting technology can include punched cards, optical scan voting systems and specialized voting kiosks (including self-contained direct-recording electronic voting systems, or DRE). It can also involve transmission of ballots and votes via telephones, private computer networks, or the Internet. The functions of electronic voting depends primarily on what the organizers intent to achieve.

In general, two main types of e-voting can be identified:

  • e-voting which is physically supervised by representatives of governmental or independent electoral authorities (e.g. electronic voting machines located at polling stations);
  • remote e-voting via the Internet (also called i-voting) where the voter submits his or her vote electronically to the election authorities, from any location.[1][2][3][4][5]

Many countries have used electronic voting for at least some elections, including Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States. As of 2023, Brazil is the only country in which all elections are conducted through electronic voting.[6]

  1. ^ "i-Voting". e-Estonia. Archived from the original on 11 February 2017.
  2. ^ "Res. 9597 Philippines concerning grid power requirements for various needs including i-voting". nea.gov.ph. Archived from the original on 2 July 2013.
  3. ^ "Switzerland's new legislation on internet voting". electoralpractice.ch. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 5 February 2019.
  4. ^ Buchsbaum, T. (2004). "E-voting: International developments and lessons learnt". Proceedings of Electronic Voting in Europe Technology, Law, Politics and Society. Lecture Notes in Informatics. Workshop of the ESF TED Programme Together with GI and OCG.
  5. ^ Zissis, D.; Lekkas (April 2011). "Securing e-Government and e-Voting with an open cloud computing architecture". Government Information Quarterly. 28 (2): 239–251. doi:10.1016/j.giq.2010.05.010.
  6. ^ Stott, Michael; Pooler, Michael; Harris, Bryan (22 June 2023). "The discreet US campaign to defend Brazil's election". Financial Times. Retrieved 8 May 2024.