Online Democracy, Is it Viable? Is it Desirable? Internet Voting and Normative Democratic Theory
Hubertus Buchstein · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2004
Internet voting has become a challenging field of action for political scientists, computer companies and legal advisers. Its introduction is on the current reform agenda of nearly all democracies (and semi-democracies). In various projects all over the world, the technical details for ‘Internet voting’, ‘online elections’, ‘cyber vote’ and ‘e-voting’ are being worked out (I will use all these terms synonymously). The academic discussion about Internet voting is centred upon various technical, empirical, analytical and constitutional questions which arise from the new voting technique. Surprisingly, the underlying normative arguments and the implicit democratic theories which are at the core of the digital reform project and which were the driving force behind the movement for online voting have vanished from sight in the course of these debates.