Abstract

The research assesses the social impact of introducing automated electoral procedures. Starting with an overview of the current debate in the Italian and in the international arena, it considers the viewpoint of different stakeholders: bureaucrats, politicians, civil society, pressure groups and the market within four case studies (Estonia, Ireland, Great Britain and the Netherlands) to highlight the direct and unexpected consequences of changing a long established habit in such a delicate matter as voting. It also draws data from the largest Italian experimentation of electronic voting in a supervised environment – held in the Autonomous Province of Trento between 2004 and 2009 – to report on the attitudes and on the actual behaviour of electors facing the electronic option. The deployment of multivariate regression models on survey data supports the hypothesis of existing divides between those who are favourable to automation in elections and those who are not, the main cleavages being age and education. Furthermore, a greater degree of trust in the generalised other is needed in e-voting but not perceived in i-voting, while both voting procedures appeal those who are already politically mobilized but less attached to traditions. A greater level of techno-determinism is also related to the propensity of accepting automated procedures. Evidence about the practice of e-voting during the experimentation – gathered by means of an innovative method labelled as parallel ethnography – shows that during the field trial unforeseeable threats occurred to the constitutional requirements of personality, equality and secrecy. This hiatus between instructions and instructed actions calls not only for a more thorough training of electronic scrutinizers but also for a better design of the machine’s interface and for an adequate legal framework, should e-voting become legally binding.