Social and Technical Issues in Trusting E-Voting: A Case Study on Jordan

Elections represent the highest level of democracy, where citizens choose their leaders and representatives. Merging technology with the election process in order to facilitate voting and solve the problem of declining turnout is already an existent reality, and several countries are using or testing different types of electronic voting systems. Jordan is one of the countries that have not yet started testing this technology. This research explores the readiness of the Jordanian society to trust e-voting technology, including identifying the requirements that should be considered to build this trust, and investigating the social and technical issues that can play a role in accelerating or slowing down the adoption process. Based on previous research, a trust model is developed and examined. The model is comprised of two components: e-voting trust parameters and e-voting issues. The questions of the research 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? For answering these questions, the quantitative method is adopted and a questionnaire was used to collect the needed data. Several statistical methods were used to analyze the data. The results show that there exists a considerable trust in technology and its ability to provide users with the needed e-voting systems. The results of the first question showed that trust in e-voting is positively affected by the fulfillment of the trust requirements, which, from the citizen's perspective, have different priorities. For the second question, the outcomes showed that these issues (authentication type, the conduit digital divide, and user expectation) also have a positive relation with creating a trust environment for e-voting.