Digital Democracy: A Review of the History of Internet Voting

The act of voting is a core element in the functioning of Democracy. We are regularly voting in elections for choosing the mayor of our city, the president of our region or the composition of our parliament; we are voting for taking decisions in Referendums, to decide the future development of corporations in business meetings or to take community decisions in social participation processes. The history of voting has not been separated from the development of technology, and new ways to cast votes have been developed since democracy has consolidated as the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried so far (Winston Churchill). From the first approaches to voting based on rising hands or tokens to take collective decisions to the most advanced and digitally based ways to cast a vote, there have been a long story of innovation. In this paper we will focus on the development of Internet voting.