E-voting technology is not neutral!

Voting procedures and technologies have to guarantee that elections are free and secure. Most of the procedural safeguards rely on the social context of the ballot. E-voting may seriously change this. If voters consider the new technology as less privacy protecting, as less secure, and as less accountable, they may change their voting behavior. This may influence their decision whether to participate in the vote, but also what they vote, and therefore the outcome of the ballot. In this paper, we try to investigate this empirically, based on an experiment with an Internet voting system. It is obvious that several social and procedural settings of ballots may change due to the characteristics of the new voting media. Let us summarize this briefly. Internet voting may