“Social and technical issues in adopting e-voting: a case study on Jordan”.​​​

“Social and Technical Issues in Trusting E-Voting: A Case Study on Jordan”, The 12th European Conference on e-Government, Barcelona, Spain. ECEG 2012.

Author: Numan, A. (2012).

Abstract: Nowadays society is characterized with the huge development of IT and its involvement in almost all aspects of people's activities.

One of the most important and democratic activities is the elections through which citizens exercise their right to select their leaders and representatives. Merging technology with the election process in order to facilitate the election for people is already an existing reality, and several countries are using or testing different shapes of electronic voting systems.

Jordan is one of the countries that have not yet started testing this technology in order to adopt it.

This research explores the readiness of the Jordanian society to trust e-voting technology and the requirements that should be considered to build this trust, in addition to investigating the social and technical issues that can play a role in accelerating or slowing down the adoption process.

Based on previous studies and researches a trust model is developed and examined.

The model is comprised of two components, namely e-voting trust parameters and e-voting issues.

For answering the research questions the quantitative method is adopted and the questionnaire was used as the tool to collect data about the required subjects.

After choosing the targeted population and sample, the questionnaire was distributed and collected.

Several statistics methods were used to analyze the collected data.

The main findings of the research show that in general there exists a considerable trust in the ability of technology to provide users with the needed features and services including e-voting systems.

For the questions of the research which are : do the 'trust' requirements, security, usability, privacy, audit, reliability and equity of access, really affect citizens' trust in e-voting? And do some e-voting issues (social and technical ; authentication type, the conduit digital divide, and user expectation) influence trusting the e-voting system? The results showed that trust in e-voting is positively affected by the fulfillment of these requirements, and that the mentioned issues play role in creating an environment of trust in e-voting.

This type of researches is highly needed in Jordan to prepare the Jordanian citizens to adopt the e-voting technology smoothly and successfully, as these systems are in their way to be a real fact in modern life​