A step-wise refinement approach for enhancing e-voting acceptance
Christos Manolopoulos, Dimitris Sofotassios, Polyxeni Nakou, Yannis C. Stamatiou, Anastasia Panagiotaki, Paul G. Spirakis · 2008
The successful transformation of e-Government from a nice idea into a successful reality had been hindered by a variety of factors ranging from bureaucratic and legislative inertia to the inability of countries to achieve a sufficient IT penetration in their societies. Nowadays, the fall in IT prices, the development of innovative IT solutions and the rise in IT literacy in a number of countries has, at least tackled the latter issue. However, people still are not as enthusiastic, as it was envisaged by technocrats and politicians, in using IT solutions to pass from e-Government to e-Governance, a notable example of which is e-Voting. In this paper we argue that efforts to introduce complex e-Government and e-Participation applications should be gradual and develop solutions hand-in-hand with in-field trials that increase (also gradually) in complexity and people inclusiveness, so as to handle the various forms of social inertia successfully. We present our experience in the e-Voting domain and suggest that a similar approach in e-Voting (and other demanding e-Government/e-Participation applications) could fare better to success than introducing to people a system that suddenly appears and claims to be the perfect, all-in-one, solution.