The Principles Established by the Recommendation CM/Rec(2017)5 on Standards for E-voting Applied to Other Channels of Remote Voting

Abstract

E-voting is highly suspicious to many citizens and institutions. Past pilot implementations ended before Supreme Courts and mostly not in favour of e-voting. Beside these political and legal battles regarding e-voting, postal voting seems to be commonly accepted and not in question. Motivated by a landmark ruling of the Austrian Constitutional Court in 2016, which led to the revocation of the run-off elections result due to irregularities with postal voting, this paper analyses whether current postal voting regulations and standards in Germany comply to the principles established by the latest Council of Europe (CoE) recommendation on standards for e-voting. Both voting channels are channels for remote voting, hence principles established for one channel must, in the view of the author, also be fully applicable for the other channel. This paper applies the standards set by the recommendation to e-voting to the more commonly used remote voting channel postal voting and concludes that most of these standards cannot be met.