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

10.1016/j.electstud.2023.102679

0261-3794

Turnbull-Dugarte, Stuart J.

e25c6280-842c-407f-a961-6472eea5d845

Devine, Daniel

6bfa5a27-1b58-4c61-8eb0-a7a40860a4ae

December 2023

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).

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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