Until 2022, Internet voting has been used for the purpose of elections only in a few countries. It is a voting mechanism that is being researched as an instrument that enables easy access to the voters, which would otherwise find it difficult to get to the polling station. The existence of this type of voting also proved as important when one of the world’s biggest health crises, the pandemic of covid-19, swept the world.
The Master’s thesis focuses on the relevance of Internet voting and its intention to use it in Slovenia in the future. The covid-19 pandemic is slowing down, and a powerful digital transformation of society’s development has awakened. The intention to introduce it to the public is based on modern technology, but it also brings several technological challenges in the areas of security, privacy, and secrecy. The thesis focuses on all the challenges in a comprehensive way and examines the state of play of the public and private sectors and i-voting before and after the covid-19 crisis.
In the empirical research linear regression was used. The results show a weak correlation between the covid-19 pandemic and the use of ICT in the private life of citizens and between the use of IT and the intention to use Internet voting in the future. Using Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient, we conclude that there are no major discrepancies when it comes to the relationship between e-participation indices and IT use during the pandemic period.
Despite the constraints that characterised the covida-19 pandemic, it did not, according to our results, bring about major changes in the use of ICT in citizens' lives. Simultaneously, the use of ICT among citizens does not indicate any impact on the increased preference of i-elections, which means that Slovenia could only gain support for i-elections when the technical, political, and social conditions are met that will give people confidence in the electoral system, policies and offered technological solutions. The results show a strong basis for further research addressing this broader context of i-elections which can also be used as a platform for further research in the future.
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