Individual attitudes towards internet voting in France

Online voting has often been mentioned as a solution to declining turnout (Germann and Serdult 20217). While the literature is divided on the topic, various studies emphasise the importance of digital skills (Goodman et al 2018) required by the population to which digital voting is offered, while a habit effect (Solvak and Vassil 2017) seems to operate in the adoption of online voting. In other words, once people start voting online, they do not stop. This raises important questions on how citizens are coping with the adoption of online voting. What are the opinions of citizens regarding online voting? To address this research question, we focus on a case study, France, to explore the perceptions and attitudes vis-à-vis the use of technology-driven tools in elections. Emmanuel Macron, for example, had planned in his 2017 programme to "generalise electronic voting by 2022". While the promise was not kept, the context of the health crisis and the subsequent widespread social distancing rules as well as the massive abstention in recent years, have led many political actors to speak out in favour of online voting. We contribute to this debate based on new data from a post-election survey carried out in 2022, in order to empirically assess the opinions of French citizens on online voting and the factors seem to be particularly important in the propensity to consider using or not online voting if available.