Electronic Voting Worldwide: The State of the Art

Electronic voting allows people to participate more easily in their country’s electoral events. Nevertheless, its adoption is still far from widespread. In this paper, we provide a detailed survey of the state of adoption worldwide and investigate which socio-economic factors may influence such an adoption. Its usage is wider in North and South America, while remaining considerably lower in Europe and Asia and practically absent in Africa. Four factors (country’s surface and population, Gross Domestic Product, and Democracy Index) are investigated to predict adoption, and an accuracy of over 90% is achieved through a machine learning random forest model. Larger, more wealthy, and more democratic countries are typically associated with a larger adoption of Internet voting.