Democratizing Power of Internet Voting Revised

Internet voting is believed to promote democracy: it increases electoral turnout, enfranchises new groups of voters, brings greater voter convenience. The reason for such belief might be that, so far, the studies of Internet voting implementation have been limited to democratic countries. However, the diffusion of Internet voting around the world follows the same path as the spread of voting machines: it expands from the developed democracies to developing ones. Recently, Internet voting has been trialled in countries with non-democratic environment. This article looks at the case of Internet voting trial in 2019 Local elections in Russia in order to study whether the prerequisites and outcomes of Internet voting implementation are essentially different for non-democratic countries in comparison to democratic ones. Hence, the article aims at answering the following questions: What are the motives and enablers for Internet voting implementation in a non-democratic country? What are the political implications of Internet voting implementation in a non-democratic country? Based on the comparison with the findings from the previous case-studies, the paper establishes, first, if the motives and enablers of Internet voting implementation in a non-democratic country are different from those in a democratic one; second, if the political implications of Internet voting in a non-democratic country is different from those in a democratic one; and finally, if one part of the equation is similar for both democratic and non-democratic countries, how does it produce different outcomes?