Abstract:

In nine official votes between January 2003 and November 2006, authorities in Geneva invited up to 90,000 citizens to test a remote e-Voting system as a complement to traditional voting methods. Multidisciplinary teams composed of legal, political, PR, security and computer science specialists, strongly supported by the Government, participated in creating the system which has been positively appraised by the Geneva Parliament in 2006.

Notes:

Published in the EU Portal

Topic: eParticipation, eDemocracy and eVoting

Full Text:

In nine official votes between January 2003 and November 2006, authorities in Geneva invited up to 90,000 citizens to test a remote e-Voting system as a complement to traditional voting methods. Multidisciplinary teams composed of legal, political, PR, security and computer science specialists, strongly supported by the Government, participated in creating the system which has been positively appraised by the Geneva Parliament in 2006.

The paper shows that the concept of e-Voting can indeed be made to work and that it allows an important and stable body of voters a comfortable and secure alternative to traditional ways of voting. Remote e-Voting is not a problem to be solved using only standard technical procedures; it has more to do with a leap of faith into the unknown because it opens perspectives that do not connect to our experience. Like for most complex socio-technical systems, success owes more to a tightly controlled development process than to technology (Riera 2002).

This paper reports on the project, its results in terms of numbers and socio-political profile of e-Voters, and its success factors. All three authors were directly or indirectly involved in the project from the beginning and are currently working on the deployment of Geneva's eGovernment platform (Sandoz 2005).

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