E-Voting Versus e-Trust: A Case Study for e-Democracy in Palestine

The world at present is facing a number of real challenges in the face of persistent economic crisis, local conflicts and huge waves of refugees. All of the above are affecting secure access to and completion of peoples voting rights. The relevant technological solutions appear to have matured and have successfully responded to rigorous testing. The need for digital access to election events is probably higher than ever in digital age. The question that remains to be answered is whether all this enough to inspire people to trust the systems and participate amass in e-voting particularly in areas where the political climate might be volatile. Palestinian have been scattered across the world since the late 1940s. This forced diaspora creates particular challenges as the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to gain international recognition as an emerging state. The PA is experiencing a huge difficulty in enabling its citizens to elect their representative. According to PA officials many countries who are hosting Palestinians as refugees don't accept the facilitation of elections for representatives to the PA government. Using e-voting systems could offer a solution to overcoming this problem and the PA has been evaluating such systems since 2011. The inspiration for this paper is taken from the results of an extensive survey conducted by the authors to evaluate the response amongst Palestinians around the world to the Palestinian Authority's decision to fully embrace e-Voting.