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Volume 4 Issue 2 December 2006
Success Factors of Geneva’s e-Voting System
Michel Chevallier, Michel Warynski, Alain Sandoz
State Chancery, Republic and Canton of Geneva
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In eight official votes between January 2003 and April 2005 authorities in Geneva invited up to 90,000 citizens to test a remote e-Voting system as a complement to traditional voting methods. In autumn 2006, the Geneva parliament has been handed a bill proposal that will end the pilot phase and make internet voting a normal way of casting one’s ballot.
This success was possible under a range of conditions. Voting almost belongs to the Swiss citizens’ everyday life because of the so-called “direct democracy” system. There was no need to create a habit, it was here. Voting is an impact-rich act, therefore it is valued. We can provide citizens with a “one-stop voting procedure” by delivering them the voting material and ID features at home.
Interestingly, this new procedure appeals to a category of citizens who didn’t vote before. Theirs was not a refusal of politics, but a sort of partial blindness to the traditional ways (polling stations, postal vote) of ballot casting.
Multidisciplinary teams composed of specialists in law, political rights, public relations, government, security, and computer science, together with strong support from the Government itself were necessary to build the system. This system copies the postal voting process and includes an audit trail available to the electoral commission.
The 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 e-Government platform (Sandoz 2005).
Keywords:
remote e-voting, direct democracy, project success factors
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