How to tackle multidisciplinarity in internet voting research?

Internet voting brings with it the challenge of multidisciplinarity: combined expertise from areas as different as IT, law and social science is required to design and evaluate i-voting systems. These three fields of knowledge are the main (but not the only) ones involved. To start with: mutual understanding is required. We postulate that “mutual understanding” implies integrating the main caveats of other disciplines in own reasoning. Multidisciplinary research on internet voting has been attempted in some places, through inter-disciplinary teams. However, such efforts remain rare probably due to lack of resources and maybe also to lack of a clear vision on its necessity. Uni-disciplinary research, on the other side, may lead to results which are “sound” from the perspective of one field, while ignoring/excluding important caveats from other fields. Looking at multidisciplinarity from a researcher’s perspective we discuss the necessity and possibilities of integrating other disciplines’ caveats into own reasoning. As an example, we will refer to three social science pieces: a public opinion poll (Switzerland) and two peer-reviewed publications (from Canada and Estonia) addressing, respectively, i-voting’s desirability, its empowerment effect and its cost-efficiency. We identify some caveats from IT and law that have been ignored in these pieces of research. We discuss how results could look like had such caveats been included in the reflexion. Based on this exercise, we discuss approaches to tackling the challenge of multidisciplinarity and integrating caveats from other disciplines.