REPUBLIQUE
ET CANTON
DE GENEVE

 

Ge.ch > Thèmes > Citoyenneté > Votations - Elections > Votations > E-Voting > History and results of the tests and official ballots

Twelve successes so far

• Overall context
• In the beginning, there were tests
• Official ballots
• A first election
• Resumption of the regular ballots
• What did we learn?
• Turnout
• Conclusion
  
  

Overall context

Although in Switzerland political rights are managed at the cantonal level and are largely dependent o on cantonal legislation, the development of internet voting in Switzerland is based on a federal decision. Internet voting is therefore supervised by the Confederation, which for the time being imposes for federal ballots that online voting not be offered to more than 10% of all Swiss citizens. This represents approximately 500'000 persons. In the case of issues for which the double majority of voters and cantons is needed in order for them to be approved (mainly constitutional changes), this limit is coupled with a second one of 20% of the electorate of each canton offering eVoting. Swiss living abroad are not counted in this second case. These ceilings, which will be gradually raised, are intended to allow a gentle and controlled extension of this new voting channel in the country, avoiding the pitfalls of too fast and too little prepared rolling out of new technologies.

In Geneva, as in most cantons, the cantonal ballots are coupled together with the federal ones, for reasons of cost. In such cases, the federal law is the ruling one and these ceilings also apply to cantonal ballots. They impose us to limit the use of internet voting to certain municipalities only.

Here is how we proceeded to achieve internet voting in Geneva.

In the beginning, there were tests

Three preliminary tests took place in June, September and December 2001, on the occasion, respectively, of a cantonal, a municipal and a federal ballot. The issue was the verification of the relevance of the internet voting project’s specifications, of the interface’s user-friendliness and of the users’ reaction. These three tests can be considered as “laboratory” tests, because they used computers that either were only connected to the State network but not to the internet or were running in local mode. Their main aim was to assess the identification concept and to see how users reacted to the interface.

The users' sample involved in the first two tests was made of State of Geneva civil servants and members of the “electronic voting” working group of the Swiss Confederation. For the third test, the University of Geneva studied the general public’s reactions and expectations on the basis of a sample of 449 Swiss internet users.

A fourth test was organized in June 2002, on the occasion of a federal ballot. Some 1850 teenagers from grammar schools were invited to vote in real conditions: their PCs were not connected to the State network, but directly to the internet. All cast votes were retrieved from the electronic ballot box, they were successfully counted and the outcome was the expected one.

Since 1850 users were not enough to test the system’s resistance to the load, we mechanically simulated a vote in a 11’500 citizens-strong municipality. This simulation, organized on October the 30th, 2002, has shown that the system could stand a load of 1500 votes an hour, cast by 25 simultaneous “voters”.

Official ballots

At first, internet voting was offered for four municipal ballots, in addition to the regular ballot-casting channels, postal voting and polling place voting.

From the 7^th until the 18^th of January 2003, citizens of the village of Anières (1162 registered voters) could express themselves online on a referendum attacking a municipal building renovation credit. Overall turnout reached 63.7% and the number of votes cast by internet amounted to 323, or 44% of all valid votes.

From November the 17^th to the 29^th, 2003, citizens of the municipality of Cologny (2521 registered voters) could vote online on an initiative fighting a housing development in the village. Turnout reached 59% and the number of online votes amounted to 432, or 29% of all valid votes.

From the 2^nd to the 17^th of April 2004, citizens of the city of Carouge (9049 registered voters) could vote online on the referendum launched against the purchase of a cinema by the city. Turnout reached 44% and the number of online votes amounted to 1024, or 26% of all valid votes.

From May the 28^th till June the 12^th 2004, citizens of the city of Meyrin (9180 registered voters) could vote online on an initiative aiming at creating an artificial lake. Turnout reached 39% and the number of internet votes amounted to 788, or 22% of all valid votes.

In the second half-year of 2004, three official ballots took place using internet voting. Two of them were federal ballots. In addition, a consultation was organized for the Council of Europe.

From the 3^rd to the 25^th of September 2004, the citizens of Anières, Carouge, Cologny and Meyrin (about 22'0000 registered voters altogether) could vote online for a ballot which encompassed four federal questions, two cantonal and a municipal one. Turnout reached 57.1% and the number of online votes reached 2723, or 21.8% of all valid votes.

From the 8^th until the 23^rd of October 2004, citizens of the municipality of Vandoeuvres (1382 registered voters) could vote by internet on a municipal referendum regarding the traffic regulation in the village. Turnout reached 59.55 % and the number of online votes amounted to 240, or 32% of all valid votes.

Parallel to this last ballot, a consultation was organized on behalf of the Council of Europe. Some 27'000 pupils in 81 schools from 20 European countries were asked to express their opinion about the “Violence-free school charter”. About 16'400 of them cast an (unofficial) vote. This operation enabled us to check that voting from abroad did not pose any problem, in spite of the use of cryptography. It was a first test of the feasibility of electronic voting for the abroad-living Swiss citizens.

From the 5^th to the 27^th November 2004, citizens of Anières, Carouge, Collonge-Bellerive, Cologny, Meyrin, Onex, Vandoeuvres and Versoix (41'200 registered voters altogether) could vote online for a ballot which comprised three federal questions and two cantonal ones. Turnout reached 43.9% and the number of votes cast by internet amounted to 3755, or 22.4% of all votes.

In September and November 2004, quite a few users were hindered in their attempt to vote online because of the release of Windows XP SP2, which blocked by default the pop-up windows which the voting application was then using. We modified our application to suppress pop-up windows for the April 2005 ballot.

From the 8^th till the 23^rd April 2005, citizens of Anières, Bernex, Carouge, Chêne-Bourg, Collonge-Bellerive, Cologny, Grand-Saconnex, Lancy, Meyrin, Onex, Thônex, Vandoeuvres, Vernier and Versoix (about 88'000 persons representing 40% of the Geneva electorate) could vote online on the occasion of a purely cantonal ballot. Turnout in these municipalities reached 44.15% and the number of internet votes amounted to 7911, or 20.35% of all valid votes. Contrary to all previous ballots, there was neither awareness raising nor information campaign on eVoting for this vote.

A first election

In the autumn of 2006, the Geneva Technical School wished to use internet voting to elect its board. This election took place from the 20^th to the 23^rd of November 2006 and represents the first online election in Geneva. No other voting channel was offered to the participants.

The turnout among the 945 students, teachers and staff members of the school reached 29%, a very high figure for an administrative election.

Resumption of the regular ballots

In 2007, the government introduced a proposal to amend the law on political rights, in order to add internet voting as a regular voting channel. From then on, online ballots were suspended to make way for the parliamentary debate. The parliament chose to upgrade the proposal to turn it into a constitutional amendment. Its mid-2008 adoption by the parliament allowed the resumption of electronic votes.

As all constitutional amendments, this one had to be submitted in a popular vote. It was definitely approved by the Geneva voters on February the 8^th, 2009, with a 70,2% majority.

From the 7^th to the 29^th of November 2008, 45'000 citizens of nine municipalities (Anières, Carouge, Chêne-Bourg, Collonge-Bellerive, Cologny, Meyrin, Thônex, Vandoeuvres and Versoix) were able to vote on-line on the occasion of a federal and cantonal ballot. 2741 votes were cast on-line, that is 14% of all votes cast for this ballot in these municipalities.

This tenth ballot shows a different turnout pattern than the previous ones, for two main reasons. Two and a half years without online ballots had dulled the Geneva voters’ habit to cast a ballot on their computer.

The second reason illustrates one of internet voting constraints. The Geneva application had been steadily upgraded between 2005 and 2008. A java applet to be downloaded by the voters had been added, among other new features. Yet, Apple released an upgrade of its operating system just days before the ballot and, as a consequence, many Mac users trying to vote online encountered difficulties. Based on the prevalence of Mac OS in Geneva (25% of the State web site visitors use Apple computers) and the calls to the helpdesk during the ballot, we can estimate that three to four points of online turnout were lost for technical reasons.

From April the 24^th 2009 May the 16^th, 45'600 citizens of eleven municipalities (Anières, Bernex Chêne-Bourg, Collonge-Bellerive, Cologny, Grand-Saconnex, Onex, Perly-Certoux, Plan-les-Ouates, Thônex and Vandoeuvres) were able to vote by internet for the second federal ballot of the year. 3111 votes were cast online, or 15.9 % of all votes cast for this ballot in these municipalities. A third of these votes were cast during the last two days of the ballot.

According to the federal strategy, the next internet voting implementation stage will take place in September 2009. Then, the 15'600 Geneva voters living abroad will be able to vote online for the September 27^th ballot, in addition to ten Geneva municipalities. In November 2009, 8000 abroad-living citizens registered in the canton of Basel-Stadt should also be able to vote online by being hosted on the Geneva internet voting platform.

What did we learn?

The studies led by the Centre for Research on Direct Democracy (c2d) in the framework of the first online ballots (www.ge.ch/evoting/english/doc/rapports/rapport_final_carouge_en.pdf) as well as the phone survey conducted during the first online federal ballot of September 2004 (www.ge.ch/evoting/english/doc/rapports/rapport_26sept_english_final.pdf) show that internet is not merely a complement to postal voting, but that it reaches a new category of citizens. Voters of less than 55 years of age use massively internet voting. Online voting seduces abstainers and irregular voters whose common feature is the taste for information technologies and their feeling of confidence in computers use.

The c2d studies show that, depending on the type of ballot and issues, 12% to a 25% of internet voting users define themselves as occasional voters or as regular abstainers. Some 80% of these assert that they would vote more often if internet voting was generalized. Although this is only a statement of intent, it indicates a potential for turnout increase with online voting.

Turnout

The impact of internet voting on turnout is debated. There are for the time being only theoretical studies on the question and they diverge in their conclusions.

The ballots conducted in Geneva do not yet allow drawing a conclusion, for lack of a series of comparable data. There is indeed no significant series of ballots of comparable type (municipal, cantonal and\or federal) held in the same municipalities to perform a reliable statistical analysis. The volatility of turnout is too marked and too dependent on the issues brought to the ballot to close now in a scientific and undisputable way this question.

One can nevertheless notice that internet "takes" voters away from postal voting, but not from polling stations, where attendance still makes some 5% of all votes cast.

On the basis of the c2d study, one can however assert that the share of voters aged less than 30 actually casting a vote in the ballots where online voting is offered is higher than average.

Finally, the vote distribution in time is not the same for postal voting and for internet voting. Postal votes progress linearly during the ballots’ three weeks period, whereas more than 50% of electronic votes are concentrated over the last week and even about 30% on the last 36 opening hours of the ballot.

Conclusion

Internet voting is a social and political project much more than a technical project. It brings a social improvement in it that it widens the circle of citizens involved in politics and political decision-making. Its success is built on new mobility and flexibility needs. Online voting reaches a public who is not anymore responsive neither to the polling booth nor to the paper ballot, a public who fully enjoys the possibilities offered by information technologies. Finally it helps enfranchising citizens who would not otherwise vote.

September 2009