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Support for digitising the ballot box: a systematic review of i-voting pilots and a conjoint experiment

Support for digitising the ballot box: a systematic review of i-voting pilots and a conjoint experiment
Support for digitising the ballot box: a systematic review of i-voting pilots and a conjoint experiment

Governments across the globe have been actively engaged in pilots aimed at implementing i-voting, which facilitates voting via the internet. I-voting innovations, such as those widely institutionalised in Estonia, Canada, and Switzerland, represent a modernising policy innovation that can increase the convenience of electoral participation and can also safeguard against the temporal suspensions of elections, such as those witnessed in several states during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst the wider implementation of i-voting has made some process, it has received mixed public support, mostly due to fears over its integrity. In this paper, we ask: what features of i-voting attract public support and inspire trustworthiness in its implementation? We answer this using a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in the UK, where we derive attributes from a comprehensive systematic review of existing literature and case studies of real-world implementation. Consistent with a rational-choice model of voting, reforms that are more convenient and have substantive reported benefits, specifically reforms that promise increases in participation, enjoy higher support. Electoral integrity remains an important factor in citizens support for, and trust in, i-voting: across the board, i-voting is perceived as less trustworthy than in-person voting, and proposals that may positively influence the risk of fraud are strongly rejected. Against pre-registered hypotheses, we do not find significant subgroup heterogeneity, for instance regarding satisfaction with internet coverage or the current electoral process, nor do we find significant variation based on past levels of engagement with alternative (convenience) options to in-person voting or indeed partisanship.

Conjoint experiment, Democratic innovations, Digital democracy, Digitisation, Electronic voting, I-voting, Public opinion
0261-3794
Turnbull-Dugarte, Stuart J.
e25c6280-842c-407f-a961-6472eea5d845
Devine, Daniel
6bfa5a27-1b58-4c61-8eb0-a7a40860a4ae
Turnbull-Dugarte, Stuart J.
e25c6280-842c-407f-a961-6472eea5d845
Devine, Daniel
6bfa5a27-1b58-4c61-8eb0-a7a40860a4ae

Turnbull-Dugarte, Stuart J. and Devine, Daniel (2023) Support for digitising the ballot box: a systematic review of i-voting pilots and a conjoint experiment. Electoral Studies, 86, [102679]. (doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2023.102679).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Governments across the globe have been actively engaged in pilots aimed at implementing i-voting, which facilitates voting via the internet. I-voting innovations, such as those widely institutionalised in Estonia, Canada, and Switzerland, represent a modernising policy innovation that can increase the convenience of electoral participation and can also safeguard against the temporal suspensions of elections, such as those witnessed in several states during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst the wider implementation of i-voting has made some process, it has received mixed public support, mostly due to fears over its integrity. In this paper, we ask: what features of i-voting attract public support and inspire trustworthiness in its implementation? We answer this using a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in the UK, where we derive attributes from a comprehensive systematic review of existing literature and case studies of real-world implementation. Consistent with a rational-choice model of voting, reforms that are more convenient and have substantive reported benefits, specifically reforms that promise increases in participation, enjoy higher support. Electoral integrity remains an important factor in citizens support for, and trust in, i-voting: across the board, i-voting is perceived as less trustworthy than in-person voting, and proposals that may positively influence the risk of fraud are strongly rejected. Against pre-registered hypotheses, we do not find significant subgroup heterogeneity, for instance regarding satisfaction with internet coverage or the current electoral process, nor do we find significant variation based on past levels of engagement with alternative (convenience) options to in-person voting or indeed partisanship.

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Accepted/In Press date: 25 August 2023
Published date: December 2023
Additional Information: Funding Information: We acknowledge support from St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford , and Public Policy Southampton, for financing the research. An earlier iteration of this paper benefited from feedback provided by participants of the Digital Democracy Workshop 2022 hosted at Digital Democracy Lab (University of Zürich). We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their critical reading of the paper. Most importantly, we received excellent research assistance from Lara Woo and Yingsu Mao at the University of Oxford. Funding Information: We acknowledge support from St Hilda's College, University of Oxford, and Public Policy Southampton, for financing the research. An earlier iteration of this paper benefited from feedback provided by participants of the Digital Democracy Workshop 2022 hosted at Digital Democracy Lab (University of Zürich). We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their critical reading of the paper. Most importantly, we received excellent research assistance from Lara Woo and Yingsu Mao at the University of Oxford. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors
Keywords: Conjoint experiment, Democratic innovations, Digital democracy, Digitisation, Electronic voting, I-voting, Public opinion

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 481545
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/481545
ISSN: 0261-3794
PURE UUID: 5acf4852-b3d9-40a2-b0d4-209405c17ae3
ORCID for Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-9330-3945
ORCID for Daniel Devine: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-0335-1776

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Date deposited: 01 Sep 2023 16:53
Last modified: 18 Mar 2024 03:56

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Author: Daniel Devine ORCID iD

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