From Initial Idea to Piecemeal Implementation

Abstract

The formal genesis of e-voting in Switzerland can be traced back to a series of motions deposited by parliamentarians in 2000. At the time the Swiss were not alone in trying to roll out e-voting programmes in the early 2000s. Indeed, a large number of European countries were pursuing similar e-voting policy agendas. A decade later very few countries can be said to have implemented e-voting. One of these, Estonia, has fully generalised e-voting as a mode of participation for a range of electoral contests. While much has been written about the Estonian case, less is known about the Helvetic route to implementing e-voting. In this chapter, the authors analyse the piecemeal approach to implementing e-voting in the Swiss case. The fact that the Helvetic route to implementing e-voting involved three competing systems offers a comparative anchor for examining the sustainability of each system. It is in this sense that Switzerland offers a useful political laboratory for analysing the problems of modernising elections in the digital era and provides insights that may be generalisable to other cases.