Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 18th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview II. Working Group on e-Government Author(s) Branko Dimeski University "St. Kliment Ohridski" Kicevo Republic of North Macedonia Meri Boskoska, PhD in economics Milco Prisajganec, BSc in electric engineer Title Electronic voting: Necessity or fiction File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract ABSTRACT Electronic voting or popular stated E-voting is one of the most innovative ways for electoral voting during the presidential, parliamentary and local government elections. The concept was being searched in a literature for the recent years and primarily is based on the usage of information technology. The principal research objectives of the paper are: • to search for the main advantages and disadvantages of using electronic, E-voting during an electoral campaign; • conditions of implementation; • basic laws or needed legislature that is of necessary importance that will permits mass and free usage implementation of electronic, E-voting; • various experiences of implementation of electronic voting in different countries in the world and the expressions that exist in the literature of their successful or unsuccessful implementation. The scope of the research is covering explanation of the abovementioned objectives and will depend on the knowledge that already exists in the literature and is provided by different authors that made past research on electronic, E-voting. For the purpose of writing the paper, we employed different methodology that will be based on: • content analysis of various governmental documents and research papers that are dealing the issue of electronic popular voting; • comparative analysis; and • during the research, the deduction aspect will be applied. The research summarized the following results and findings: • the electronic, E-voting is characterized with numerous advantages as: transparency, availability, speed, efficiency and effectiveness; • the disadvantages include: communication problems, possible computer defects, insufficient political culture among the residents and political parties which is expressed in doubtful acceptance of using the electronic, E-voting and possible fraudulent behaviors that can result in revealing or abusing the electoral data during the voting process; • in order for the electronic voting to be successful implemented there are a certain conditions that must be met; • adopting the basic laws or needed legislation that is of necessary importance that will permit mass and free usage implementation of electronic voting; • many countries in the world have already implemented electronic voting at different times as governmental projects under different titles. In some countries the system was successfully implemented while in the others it was unsuccessful. From the research findings and results, the following principal conclusions can be derived: • in recent years, electronic voting is a very popular way of processing electoral data. Besides the fact that there are numerous noted disadvantages, its advantages overcome the disadvantages; • without adopting an appropriate legislation, the system of electoral voting can not be implemented in the country/countries. In other words, there must be a strong political will and personal confidence among the politicians that the electronic voting system is a way ahead better than the present way of voting and counting the votes; and • finally, so far the system was implemented in many countries in the world and there were different experiences, from highly positive to highly negative. These experiences can serve as an indicator for future successful implementation of the electronic voting in many countries in the world, by adopting the positive experiences and in the same time, eliminating the negative characteristics that can happen during the introduction and the subsequent implementation of the electronic voting system.
