Social Science Computer Review

The articles in this special issue raise and refine questions about our understanding of the use of, state of the art in, and challenges associated with voting and election technology, broadly conceived. Although researchers have yet to achieve consensus on the broad impact of information technology on our understanding of the practice of politics, the broad outlines of a research agenda are emerging. In this overview, we discuss the current work and identify important research questions that remain to be addressed.

With the recent troubles in U.S. elections, there has been a nationwide push to update voting systems. States and localities are investing heavily in electronic voting systems, many of which use a touch screen. These systems offer the promise of faster and more accurate voting; however, the current reality is that they have some shortcomings in terms of voter usability. This study examines issues related to the usability of electronic voting systems and reports on a series of usability studies that involved expert review, close observation, a field test, and an exit poll to learn voters’responses to a new voting system. Our analysis shows these systems work well; however, they have some shortcomings including some that have raised concerns among a minority of voters.

The prospect of Internet voting has received much attention because of concerns over the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. Proponents of Internet voting contend that the Internet will play an important role in revitalizing the American electorate. Opponents counter that Internet voting will benefit already advantaged groups. Using data collected in Arizona during the 2000 general election campaign, this study examined the opinions of registered voters (N = 501) toward Internet voting and found that almost one half of survey respondents opposed Internet voting. Results suggest that Internet voting could change the sociodemographic and ideological composition of the voting electorate. Concerns about the composition of the electorate, however, were not prevalent in survey participants’ open-ended responses about the potential disadvantages of Internet voting.

A model is described to explain the effect of e-voting technology on voting behavior and the outcome of a ballot. In the model, social identity and trust play a central role. After an initial and partial test, the article discusses directions for further research.

This article explores the issue of trust in the context of the e-electoral process based on the experience gained through the 2002 and 2003 U.K. e-voting pilots. In our analysis, we adopt a process-stage approach to e-elections. We identify the different agents involved in the e-electoral process so as to indicate who generates trust and to whom they convey their trust during the evolution of the process. We then describe agent responsibilities for each of the process stages to identify the issues that require trust between agents. Thus we indicate why trust was needed to support the deployment of the pilots. Based on our analysis we describe cases where “inherited trust” was indirectly conveyed between agents. Finally, because trust in e-voting is primarily needed from the electorate, we propose four levels of social acceptance for the e-voting process and discuss some trust-building arguments for prospective public administration e-transaction environments.

For campaigners, and also attendant researchers, the advent of the Internet has challenged established ways of doing their respective campaign business. Practitioners, used to running local and media campaigns, can nowadays also resort to elements of web campaigning, while electoral researchers, used to running election studies based on personal or telephone interviews, can now employ online surveys to do their business. However, e-campaigning and online polling suffer from severe deficiencies. Based on online and offline surveys conducted in the run-up to the 2002 German election, we show two things. First, online surveys yield biased results; second, e-campaigning reaches only a tiny fraction of the electorate, which is due to not only the imperfect dispersion of the Internet but also a lack of interest in political web sites among voters. Taken together, the Internet is—at least for time being—confined to adding supplementary elements to the established procedures of campaigning and polling.

Following the most recent round of redistricting, observers across the political spectrum warned that computing technology had fundamentally changed redistricting, for the worse. They are concerned that computers enable the creation of finely crafted redistricting plans that promote partisan and career goals, to the detriment of electoral competition, and that, ultimately, thwart voters’ ability to express their will through the ballot box. In this article, we provide an overview of the use of computers in redistricting, from the earliest reports of their utilization, through today. We then report responses to our survey of state redistricting authorities’computer use in 1991 and 2001. With these data, we assess the use of computers in redistricting, and the fundamental capabilities of computer redistricting systems.

This article analyzes the impact of the number of parties on turnout rates within an endogenous partisan preference framework. Our results show that the turnout increases in the number of parties under various levels of individual propensity to abstain. We find strong interactions effects between both motives for abstention—alienation and indifference—and the abstention propensity. The results are based on an agent-based computer simulation of multiparty electoral competition in a two-dimensional policy space.

Many students (and some faculty members) seem to act as if the World Wide Web contains all of human knowledge. One indication of this phenomenon is the increasing reliance on web sites by students for research purposes. This study challenges this thinking by examining variation in the amount of information on the web on several dimensions: historical time, completeness of general information, extent of information about different countries, and extent of coverage of corporations. A second phase of the study explored several predictors of amount of information on the web for these same dimensions. The predictors were time, importance of information, population (for countries), and annual revenue (for corporations). Examining the role of the predictors takes a first step toward formulating a theory that explains the content of the web.

This article presents survey measures of web-oriented digital literacy to serve as proxies for observed skill measures, which are much more expensive and difficult to collect for large samples. Findings are based on a study that examined users’ digital literacy through both observations and survey questions, making it possible to check the validity of survey proxy measures. These analyses yield a set of recommendations for what measures work well as survey proxies of people’s observed web-use skills. Some of these survey measures were administered on the General Social Survey 2000 and 2002 Internet modules, making the findings relevant for the use of existing large-scale national data sets. Results suggest that some composite variables of survey knowledge items are better predictors of people’s actual digital literacy based on performance tests than are measures of users’ self-perceived abilities, a proxy traditionally used in the literature on the topic.

This article investigates the effect of e-mail subject lines on survey viewing and survey response. Using two samples of students (low involvement with the survey sponsor and high involvement with the survey sponsor), the authors tested a variety of combinations of subject lines: the reason for the e-mail contact (survey), the sponsor of the e-mail (Liberal Arts University), a plea for help (request for assistance), and a blank subject line. The authors found a modest effect of subject line for the low-involvement sample, with blank subject lines yielding the highest response.