E-voting: Powerful symbol of E-democracy

This paper focuses on an Internet-enabled remote voting system for a young people's parliament in the Highland region of Scotland. The parliament was established to increase young people's participation in local government. Two elections have been held to constitute the parliament. For both elections, the International Teledemocracy Centre (ITC) provided e-voting systems. The second system is part of a larger participatory design project, to develop an e-democracy website that serves the parliament and increases participation in a variety of ways 1 . This paper investigates our motives for including e-voting, especially in relation to modernisation. We then evaluate the project and appraise the results according to these motives. While acknowledging the differences between this election and a statutory one, we then look at the relationship between modernisation and e-voting, in the light of our results.