E-voting: the last electoral revolution

The use of ICT has been growing exponentially during the last decade, covering all human activities. Notwithstanding this, the use of ICT to cast the vote is still –in some sense– a critical question. While some countries have adopted it due to several reasons (to reduce electoral complexity, to reflect their technological achievements or even to improve their democratic legitimacy), others seem to be reluctant even after having made different electoral processes –whatever public or private, binding or not. In addition, there’re different relevant questions to be addressed whether that implementation of e-voting solutions focuses on remote voting (casting the votes in Internet as it was in Estonia) or using e-voting machines in controlled environments (as it’s the case for Venezuela or the U.S.). Thus, our goal is to present the main findings from technical, legal and sociopolitical approaches to outline which questions are really relevant in this last electoral revolution. What we learnt is that e-voting is actually a good complementary technique to improve citizen engagement in politics but it must to be clearly said that it’s not (and it’ll not be) a political panacea.