Declining levels of turnout have become characteristic to most of the developed world while the use of internet voting has been expected to alleviate the problem. A particular feature of internet voting is convenience: instead of voting at the polling station, people can comfortably choose the time and place to cast their votes. Making voting more convenient, thus, eases political participation, especially among those for whom it is relatively costly. In this paper we link literature of electoral costs to internet voting and develop a theoretical model by which internet voting reduces the costs of participation and motivates people to use it. We test our model on the basis of Estonian internet voting data comprising three post-election studies since 2009 until 2011. Preliminary findings suggest that indeed, high electoral costs hinder traditional participation, which in turn, motivates people to opt for internet voting as a means to reduce these costs.
