Abstract
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The paper will present a case-study of how implementation of ICT and digital technologies, particularly remote electronic voting, changes the electoral processes. The main concern of this paper is whether the changes in the electoral processes, which implementation of online voting brings, increases the overall election cost. Thus, the topic of this research is framed within the discussion on the interconnectedness between the delivery of public services and citizens’ well-being. It is done in a way that this research tries to address the issue of whether the increasing costs of election administration leads to a greater quality of public services and satisfaction of citizens, and even more in other way round, whether the greater quality of public services’ delivery (in our case, the adding of an additional voting channel in a form of remote online voting) puts more costs on the public administration.
For the theoretical framework, an interdisciplinary approach combining theories on public administration, electoral management and accounting (particularly, Activity-Based Costing theory) was developed (Cooper, & Kaplan, 1992; Brown, Myring, & Gard, 1999).
For the purpose of tracing the changes in the electoral processes after the implementation of online voting, we identified processes and activities inside each available voting channel, each considered activity we analyzed in terms of number of people involved, time spent on an activity, and a cost driver of an activity, then we allocated the costs to different activities and compared the costs of different voting channels. In order to do it, we conducted the legislation analysis and budget analysis, made process modeling, and detail the findings by election observations and interviews with EMBs and NEC.
The field work for this paper was conducted in 2017 local election in Estonia. Estonia was chosen as a case-study for the reason of availability of multi-channel elections with a high number of voting methods which makes comparison possible.
Based on this research, we may make assumptions on whether the delivery of elections by the means of online voting in Estonia is more expensive and imposes greater burden on citizens than the traditional voting channels or, to the contrary, contributes to their well-being. The findings of this research is of particular importance not only to academicians, but also for society as one of the drivers for this paper was the ever-increasing demand from the citizens’ side to make electoral costs more transparent and available for cost control (The Institute for Digital Democracy, UK), in order to understand whether the money spent on the administration of elections are well spent (Clark, 2014) and whether in the realm when the delivery of other public services is experiencing the effects of austerity the spending on election administration could be optimized.
References
Brown, R. E., Myring, M. J., & Gard, C. G. (1999). Activity‐Based Costing in Government: Possibilities and Pitfalls. Public Budgeting & Finance, 19(2), 3-21.
Clark, A. (2014). The cost of elections: Money well spent?. Political Insight, 5(3), 16-19.
Cooper, R., & Kaplan, R. S. (1992). Activity-based systems: Measuring the costs of resource usage. Accounting Horizons, 6(3), 1.
The official website of the Institute for Digital Democracy, UK available at URL: https://webrootsdemocracy.org/
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