ABSTRACT
To the reader it may appear somewhat precipitate to raise the issue of e-voting 1 for European Parliamentary elections much less to compile an edited book on the subject. Perhaps it would be more prudent to make progress at the national level before even considering any moves toward offering online voting facilities at the supranational level. The sheer scale of the enterprise — the European Union (EU) is the only supranational democracy that exists today — as well as the logistical complexity, the substantial financial and administrative resource implications, not to mention the considerable technical and security hurdles that would need to be overcome, all suggest that this is, for the time being, an unviable proposition. And let us not forget the problem of the European digital divide that some have argued 2 could, if e-voting were to be implemented, skew political participation towards the more affluent socio-economic groups (both within and among EU member states) given that internet penetration rates vary substantially from Finland in the north to Portugal in the south and from Ireland in the west to Slovakia in the east. So why bother ‘upgrading’ elections that have been described by one prominent observer as decentralized and apathetic affairs in which a small number of voters participate and where barely any transnational deliberation on European issues takes place. 3 There are, as we shall argue, some very good reasons why the e-voting/EU nexus may acquire an increasing significance and this introductory chapter is, in part, a justification for addressing the question of e-voting from an EU perspective.
