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Belgian study on electronic voting systems

By Michael Alvarez

A study was recently released by a consortium of Belgian universities, "BeVoting: Study of Electronic Voting Systems." The study is in two parts (English version): Part 1 and Part 2.

This is a very comprehensive study, and well worth reading. The English version, Part 1 (page 18) has an excellent summary of the study:

There will be two parts. The first part gives an overview of electronic voting in a number of countries. That list could certainly be longer. Yet we realized soon that the first few cases already gave a good overview of advantages and problems. Adding extra cases would not improve our understanding of what is going on. The first part concludes with a comparative discussion of the elements and arguments discovered in the analysis of these countries.

The second part focuses on Belgium. Belgium has indeed introduced electronic voting in a number of polling stations ? covering some 40% of the voters ? from 1995 on. Two aspects of this introduction will be discussed. First we look at the effects on the voting behavior. Does electronic voting lead to different results or to different turnout? The fact that not all voters have the chance to vote electronically allows for a nice comparative investigation of this question. The second aspect that we will discuss is the acceptance of the new system by the voters. Both discussions are based on research that was previously done by teams at the VUB and at the ULB.

Thanks to Paul DeGregorio for passing this along!

Full post as published by Election Updates on March 21, 2008 (boomark / email).