The Virtual Polling Station - Transferring the Sociocultural Effect of Poll Site Elections to Remote Internet Voting

Public voting in polling stations is believed to have a socioculturallyintegrative effect, conveyed through the symbolic and ritualistic character of the election process. Remote internet voting is believed to not be able to provide this effect, because it omits the corporeal appearance at the polling station. The following contribution aims at indicating how such a sociocultural effect could be transferred from the real world polling station to remote internet elections. 1 The Public Nature of the Polling Station and Internet Elections All forms of electronic voting, including internet voting, have been criticized for not fulfilling the Principle of the Public Nature of the Election which was declared as a constitutional principle in the Voting-Machine-Judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court [BVerfG09] and which requires verifiability of the election for every citizen without special technical knowledge. Remote internet voting has additionally been accused of another shortcoming which the German legal literature has also located in the sphere of the Principle of the Public Nature of the Election. It has been brought forth that remote internet voting is not able to substitute the sociocultural integrative effect of public elections in real world polling stations, conveyed through the symbolic and ritualistic form of the election process. The corporeal act of voting at the polling station is described as the conscious exercise of a civil liberty as well as the perceptible expression of affiliation with the community to which is attested an identitycausing and ritualistic impact which politically integrates the voter and conveys to him a sense of the significance of the election [Ha04]. The “...polling station with its naked walls and shabby ballot boxes...” is described in contrast to the surroundings of the internet as a dramatization-free zone of political rationality [Me04]. The citizen is believed to experience himself through the ritual of the public election as sovereign and to gain the chance to identify with the state. This “symbolic-ritualistic character,” which is attested to create a constituting effect in democratic elections, is believed to be “trivialized” and to dwindle in remote internet voting [Ka05]. Votes cast via the internet