The prospects for the future of voting in the United States include the likelihood of internet voting and its potential to alter voter participation. This thesis provides a critical overview of past experiments, current studies, and the possible consequences of implementing voting over the internet. As internet use increases for education, personal communication, business and commerce, the assumption is that the public and elected officials will view the internet as the practical venue for local, state, and national elections. The potential consequences of utilizing the internet for voters to cast their ballots from personal computers from remote locations, as one future process of voting, are vital to the decisions regarding electronic elections. Challenges inherent to the technology and social consequences concerning internet voting are paramount to the debate. The internet voting process, perceived as convenient with the possible consequence of halting or reversing a declining voter turnout, must be balanced with potential risks to internet voting security and reliability. With emphasis on reports from the California Task Force and the National Science Foundation, as well as current literature regarding electronic voting, research is cited designed to address the issue of internet voting. The history of the United States to enfranchise more of its citizens and eliminate barriers that have kept voters from the polls is discussed in the context that there has been a national objective in extending the right to vote and making the ballot box accessible to all adults. Implementing a voting process that has the potential to give more voters access to elections can be viewed as a natural extension of that American legacy, and is therefore important to research and develop. / Master of Arts

E-government is the use of information technology, especially telecommunications, to enable and improve the efficiency with which government services and information are provided to its constituents. Internet voting is an emerging e-government initiative. It refers to the submission of votes securely and secretly over the Internet. In the United States some areas have already used Internet voting systems for local and state elections. Many researchers argue that one of the most important social impacts of Internet voting is the effect it could have on voter participation. Numerous studies have called for research on the impact of technology on voter turnout; however, existing literature has yet to develop a comprehensive model of the key factors that influence Internet voting adoption. In light of the gradual implementation of I-voting systems and the need for research on I-voting implications this study combines political science and information systems constructs to present an integrated model of Internet voter participation. The proposed model of Internet voting adoption posits that a combination of technical, political and demographic factors amalgamate to influence the adoption of I-voting services. The study was conducted by surveying 372 citizens ranging in age from 18-75. The findings indicate that an integrated model of I-voting adoption is superior to existing models that explore political science or technology adoption constructs in isolation. Implications of this study for research and practice are presented. / Ph. D.

Qatar is a small country in the Middle East which has used its oil wealth to invest in the country's infrastructure and education. The technology for Internet voting now exists or can be developed, but are the people of Qatar willing to take part in Internet voting for national elections?. This research identifies the willingness of government and citizens to introduce and participate in Internet voting (I-voting) in Qatar and the barriers that may be encountered when doing so. A secure I voting model for the Qatar government is then proposed that address issues of I-voting which might arise due to the introduction of such new technology. Recommendations are made for the Qatar government to assist in the introduction of I-voting. The research identifies the feasibility of I-voting and the government s readiness and willingness to introduce it. Multiple factors are examined: the voting experience, educational development, telecommunication development, the large number of Internet users, Qatar law which does not bar the use of I-voting and Qatar culture which supports I-voting introduction. It is shown that there is a willingness amongst both the people and the government to introduce I-voting, and there is appropriate accessibility, availability of IT infrastructure, availability of Internet law to protect online consumers and the existence of the e government project. However, many Qataris have concerns of security, privacy, usability, transparency and other issues that would need to be addressed before any voting system could be considered to be a quality system in the eyes of the voters. Also, the need to consider the security threat associated on client-side machines is identified where a lack of user awareness on information security is an important factor. The proposed model attempts to satisfy voting principles, introducing a secure platform for I-voting using best practices and solutions such as the smart card, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and digital certificates. The model was reviewed by a number of experts on Information Technology, and the Qatari culture and law who found that the system would, generally, satisfy voting principles, but pointed out the need to consider the scalability of the model, the possible cyber-attacks and the risks associated with voters computers. which could be reduced by enhancing user awareness on security and using secure operating systems or Internet browsers. From these findings, a set of recommendations were proposed to encourage the government to introduce I-voting which consider different aspects of I-voting, including the digital divide, e-literacy, I voting infrastructure, legal aspects, transparency, security and privacy. These recommendations were also reviewed by experts who found them to be both valuable and effective. Since literature on Internet voting in Qatar is sparse, empirical and non-empirical studies were carried out in a variety of surveys, interviews and experiments. The research successfully achieved its aim and objectives and is now being considered by the Qatari Government.

The main subject of this work is the assessment of electronic voting systems with regard to their required and achieved properties. The goal of this project is designing an electronic voting protocol that satisfies the requirements for privacy protection while also being scalable and fault-tolerant. Existing protocols are examined and compared according to their properties. The design proposed in this work uses smart contracts on blockchain and combines the approaches from the examined solutions. Scalability is achieved by dividing the process of voting between several smart contracts. Each of these contracts carries out the voting in small scale with only a subset of voters and the partial results are then aggregated. The problem of finding a suitable platform for implementation of the proposed protocol is also addressed in this work.

Remote internet voting is a phenomenon of modern democratic societies. This topic has slowly become an important and frequent subject of political research. Thus, the aim of the thesis was to analyse this inovative, but yet controversial, method of voting from the standpoint of voting rights. The first of the thesis is concern on the general theory of elections and legal concept of voting rights to understand the meaning of elements of voting rights. The second part of the thesis comprises three case studies on countries which have already organised the remote internet voting in some types of elections: Estonia, Switzerland and the Netherlands. These chapters have proved several issues and variables between particular e-voting systems, such as the possibility of casting e-votes repeatedly, who is allowed to use internet voting or where votes can be cast on-line. The main goal of the thesis was to provide a clear set of potentional barriers of remote internet voting for an accomplishment of democratic suffrage in cases of these three countries and evaluate the possibilities of the idea of remote internet voting used in the electoral system of the Czech Republic. Thus, the third part of the thesis was focused on the case of the Czech republic and main principles of vote suffrage. The author...

As low-voter-turnout continues to be a concern for the political system in the U.S., the idea online voting platforms (OVPs), to reduce access and use barriers, has been debated. Lowlevel elections in several states across the country have experimented with OVPs through U.S.based internet voting organization, Everyone Counts. These experiments resulted in both the confirmation of perceived benefits and problems. Surveying 196 U.S. citizens through Survey Sampling International, this study garnered respondents' feelings toward several factors correlated with voter-turnout, and the likelihood of adopting OVPs. Using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Technology Use Model to frame the analysis, the data were analyzed using ols regression. I predicted that citizens would perceive OVPs as an improvement to the current system, and consequently, voter-turnout would increase if OVPs were available, especially among younger citizens (ages 18-44). The analyses illustrated that OVPs would not have a large impact on voter-turnout, and for some would even discourage participation. Furthermore, it was older respondents (ages 44+) who had a stronger positive correlation between effort expectancy and feeling empowered. I conclude by suggesting that low-voter-turnout might be best combated through efforts to improve political efficacy, and that accessibility to poll booths only accounts some of the story. / Master of Science / As fewer citizens in the U.S. vote in presidential elections, online voting platforms (OVPs) have been suggested as a way to increase accessibility and make voting less difficult to do. Local and state elections in several states across the country have experimented with OVPs through U.S.-based internet voting organization, Everyone Counts. These experiments resulted in both the confirmation of perceived benefits and problems. Surveying 196 U.S. citizens through Survey Sampling International, this study² sought out respondents’ feelings toward several factors correlated with voter-turnout, and the likelihood of adopting OVPs. A technology adoption theory, the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Technology Use, was used to frame the analysis. I predicted that citizens would perceive OVPs as an improvement to the current voting system, and consequently, more citizens would vote if OVPs were available, especially among younger citizens (ages 18-44). The analyses illustrated that OVPs would not have a large impact on voter-turnout, and would even discourage voting for some. I conclude by suggesting that lowvoter-turnout might be best combated through efforts to improve political efficacy, and that accessibility to poll booths only accounts some of the story.

203 12 Dissertation Summary Dissertation title: Democracy in the Lack of Interest: the Effects of Remote Internet Voting Implementation in the Electoral Process of Selected Countries Name and Surname: Karel Sál Field of Study: Political Science Place of Work: Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague Dissertation Supervisor: PhDr. Petr Jüptner, Ph.D. No. of Pages: 203 No. of Appendixes: 30 Year of Defense: 2016 Keywords: internet voting; remote internet voting; electoral turnout; crisis of democracy; theory of participation; rational choice theory; Estonia; Switzerland; France; Norway; Spain. Abstract: The dissertation thesis named Democracy in the Lack of Interest: the Effects of Remote Internet Voting Implementation in the Electoral Process of Selected States reflects the phenomenon of the last decade - incorporation of new media into the political process. Internet voting is one of the discussed and suggested solutions of the so-called crisis of democracy, which could possibly stop the negative trend of diminishing voter turnout in advanced western democracies. The entire academic debate can be summarized into one question: It is possible, that the way of ballot casting can affect the voter turnout in that scale, that we can recognize a significant-positive...

This behavioral study examines the users’ engagement on social networking[ sites (SNS) in electoral races for public office in relation to their act of voting. This study was based on the premise that when certain criteria are met then SNS can be used as a predictive tool. The initial technique used was observations of the tools/functions on SNSs such as the “Like” button, favorable comments, retweets, friends/followers. Another technique used was surveys administered to individuals at political rallies, political debates, and college campuses to further analyze if their online engagement in politics translates to their physical participation. A quantitative case study analysis approach was used to analyze data gathered. Results of the data collected suggest that there is a positive relationship between online engagement and physical participation. The conclusion drawn from the findings suggests that SNS can be used as a predictive tool when examining electoral races for public offices.

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Technology: Information Technology, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2015. / This thesis focuses on the development of an enhanced innovative secure mobile Internet voting system architecture that offers desirable security requirements to theoretically mitigate some of the intrinsic administrative and logistical challenges of voting, inter alia lack of mobility support for voters, voter inconvenience, election misconduct, and possible voter coercion often associated with the conventional poll-site voting system. Systems in existence have tended to revolve around the need to provide ubiquitous voting, but lack adequate control mechanism to address, in particular, the important security requirement of controlling possible coercion in ubiquitous voting. The research work reported in this thesis improves upon a well-developed Sensus reference architecture. It does so by leveraging the auto-coupling capability of near field communication, as well as the intrinsic merits of global positioning system, voice biometric authentication, and computational intelligence techniques. The leveraging of the combination of these features provides a theoretical mitigation of some of the security challenges inherent in electoral systems previously alluded to. This leveraging also offers a more pragmatic approach to ensuring high level, secure, mobile Internet voting such as voter authentication. Experiments were performed using spectral features for realising the voice biometric based authentication of the system architecture developed. The spectral features investigated include Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Mel-frequency Discrete Wavelet Coefficients (MFDWC), Linear Predictive Cepstral Coefficients (LPCC), and Spectral Histogram of Oriented Gradients (SHOG). The MFCC, MFDWC and LPCC usually have higher dimensions that oftentimes lead to high computational complexity of the pattern matching algorithms in automatic speaker authentication systems. In this study, higher dimensions of each of the features were reduced per speaker using Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) algorithm, while neural network ensemble was utilised as the pattern-matching algorithm. Out of the four spectral features investigated, the LPCC-HOG gave the best statistical results with an R statistic of 0.9257 and Mean Square Error of 0.0361. These compact LPCC-HOG features are highly promising for implementing the authentication module of the secure mobile Internet voting system architecture reported in this thesis. / D

Internet voting (i-voting) has been researched since countries started trialing it two decades ago. Although several countries have abandoned their trials, some implemented i-voting in national elections. I-voting research discusses successful implementations of i-voting in countries such as Estonia, Switzerland, and Canada, which has generated many different factors for successful adoption. However, no systematic literature review (SLR) on i-voting adoption factors has been identified. The problem that this thesis addresses is the lack of a comprehensive overview on reasons why an individual decides to adopt an i-voting solution. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is “to identify i-voting adoption factors on the individual level”. This study aims to answer the following research question: “How can TAM be adapted to explain an individual’s intention to adopt i-voting?” A semi systematic literature review of 117 articles is used that contains articles spanning two decades of i-voting research. The scope is narrowed down to adoption factors on the individual level and include the non-technical factors: “Voter experiences and perceptions”, “Trust”, and “Education”, and the technical factors: “User experience”, and “Performance”. The technology acceptance model (TAM) is used to explain how the factors relate to Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) and Perceived Usability (PU) within TAM. A suggestion of an extended model is also made that includes other factors which were identified to explain individual adoption. Thus, the conclusion of this thesis is that TAM can in part explain an individual’s intention to adopt i-voting, but that it should be adapted to include the following additional factors: “Trust”, “Demographics”, “Education”, and “Voter experiences and perceptions”. Recommendations for future research on i-voting, limitations, and ethical and societal consequences are also discussed.