Opportunities and Challenges in Elections Through E-Voting: An Analysis on Voters Participation

The growing use of the Internet as a platform for holding online elections led to many public organizations conducting e-voting processes, which presents both significant opportunities and challenges. Also, spreading the idea of a Smart City brought an opportunity to allow citizens to pose their opinions and participate in online elections. Even though e-voting is a research theme vastly explored in the literature, it is yet challenging to augment the adherence of the voters in online elections. We observed in the literature that a few online elections were considered successful, with a rate of adherence of more than 60 %. So, detailed evaluations of online elections are crucial for understanding voter adherence, behavior, and patterns and for collecting the main characteristics that may influence the success of online elections. These outputs may possibly bring new insights and ideas to other online elections through e-voting and provide insights into the development of public policies to improve participation and trust in online elections. This work presents the results of an evaluation we conducted through a case study of an e-election that involved more than 1 million voters. We aimed to calculate the adherence of the voters, the electronic devices most used for voting, the average time to cast a vote, and the main form of communication chosen by voters. We observed in our case study that the adherence was 62 %, and so considered successful. Also, more than 90 % of votes were cast on smartphones, indicating that electoral platforms can focus their development on this type of device. Finally, the average voting time was 3 m 52 s, indicating that the platform was easy to use. The e-election we analyzed offered several advantages compared to in-person elections - convenience for voters, reduced operational costs, and a larger adherence. The adherence success in the eelection was due to the accessibility of the e-voting platform, the security of the system, and the user experience. Our contributions are the results we obtained and a discussion on how these results may lead to planning and improving future online elections.