Trust, Identity, and the Effects of Voting Technologies on Voting Behavior

D and introducing new technological applications is a complex undertaking and relates to and depends on many technical, social, political, organizational, legal, and behavioral factors. Therefore, real-life experimentation and multidisciplinary research are required to make the opportunities and risks of new technologies visible, and to improve the reflexivity of design, implementation, and organizational and political choices to be made. Elsewhere we showed that R&D projects are exploring similar directions, and technological trajectories seem to emerge for most essential technical components (Oostveen & van den Besselaar, 2002). However, social and behavioral issues are generally neglected or studied superficially. If we do not correct this, the result may be an uncritical introduction of new voting technologies, without any fundamental reflection about the technical and, more important, about the social and political modalities of the systems introduced. This article is based on a large project in which an e-voting system was developed and tested to determine political, organizational, administrative, and legal constraints and possibilities. We studied acceptance, trust, use, usability, organizational aspects, and the implications for voting behavior and the turnout (Oostveen & van den Besselaar 2004a, 2004b; van den Besselaar, Oostveen, De Cindio, & Ferrazzi, 2003). Our aim is to contribute to fundamental and applied knowledge about the effects of different media on voting behavior and opinion articulation and to improve social choice in designing and implementing electronic