Cost of New Voting Technologies: Learnings from Estonian Elections

With the general decline of voter turnout in established democracies around the world, a number of countries have started to look into adding alternative means of voting, including Internet and postal voting resulting in complex multi-channel elections. However, research into the governance thereof remains limited. Under this framework, we created a methodology to calculate the costs of the different electoral channels in order to bring relevant information on the way such offerings are being undertaken and how they influence and change the voting process and governance thereof, as well as answering the question how the adding/removing of Internet voting and other channels impacts overall costs thereof. The addition of E-voting mechanisms into traditional elections is justified under the assumption that it can increase the turnout and decrease the costs. In our presentation we will focus the second assumption, comparing the costs of different voting channels in the occasion of the Municipal Elections in Estonia (October 2017). As it is well known all over, Estonia had been the first country in using E-vote technologies at every electoral level (Municipal, National and European), being at the avant-garde of the digitalization of political life and being a good starting point for a cost calculation comparison. As had been said, we will present and discuss our methodology and first findings in the Estonian reality