Making Votes Count with Internet Voting

Abstract

This paper reassesses the claim that electronic voting systems help voters to avoid common mistakes that lead to their votes remaining uncounted. While prior studies have come to mixed conclusions, I provide new, more robust evidence based on a case study of extended Internet voting trials in Geneva canton, Switzerland. The trials almost exclusively involved referendum votes. For causal identification I exploit the unique circumstance that federal safety legislation created a near-natural experiment, with some of the canton's municipalities participating in the trials and others not. Using difference-indifferences estimation, I find that the residual vote rate decreased by an average of 0.3 percentage points if municipalities offered the possibility to vote online in addition to (mostly optically scanned) paper ballots. For cantonal measures, which are located towards the bottom of ballot papers in Geneva, the reduction increases to 0.5 percentage points. These remain relatively modest effects, and I find no evidence for a knock-on effect on electoral outcomes. However, on average only around 20% of votes were cast online where the opportunity existed, and online voting was most popular among voters with high levels of education. Despite the small effect sizes, the results of this study therefore point to the potential of Internet and, more generally, electronic voting technology to reduce avoidable voter mistakes.

Ballot position effects in open-list PR systems: the moderating impact of postal voting

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Internet voting from abroad: exploring turnout in the 2014 French consular elections

“…This differentiated operationalization of electoral participation into overall and effective turnout follows recent relevant work (see, e.g., Barnes and Rangel 2018 ; and Galam 2018 for French elections). Distinguishing between overall and effective turnout is particularly pertinent when comparing paper versus Internet voting, as the use of voting machines constitutes an effective method for reducing voter errors and uncounted ballots (Alvarez and Hall 2008 ; Germann 2020 ). This empirical link between e-voting and the share of invalid votes has been confirmed for various countries, such as Belgium (Dandoy 2014 ; Dejaeghere and Vanhoutte 2016 ), Brazil (Nicolau 2015 ; Fujiwara 2015 ; Katz and Levin 2018 ), India (Desai and Lee 2019 ), the Netherlands (Allers and Kooreman 2009 ), and the USA (Kimball et al 2004 ; Stewart 2006 ).…”

Internet Voting for Policy Proposals: Amplifying Open Government in Chile and Colombia

“…For instance, an online survey of Swiss citizens living outside the country found that the majority of them viewed e-voting via the Internet as easy to use, useful, efficient, and trustworthy; furthermore, the ease of use correlated with voters' willingness to Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Austria (CC BY 3.0), 2023. utilize e-voting systems (Pleger & Mertes, 2018). Research of referenda in the Swiss city of Geneva revealed that i-voting technology reduced voter mistakes that could be avoided, due to the increased effective turnout counted as the number of valid cast votes (Germann, 2021b). Similarly, a survey of 13.1% of all United States county governments uncovered that the introduction of online registration services by the government has increased the voter turnout rate in the United States midterm election (LeRoux et al, 2020).…”