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 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.