New methodology for calculating cost-efficiency of different ways of voting: is internet voting cheaper?

ABSTRACT

New ways of voting in elections are being sought by electoral administrations worldwide who want to reverse declining voter turnouts without increasing electoral budgets. This paper presents a novel approach to cost accounting for multi-channel elections based on local elections in Estonia. By doing so, it addresses an important gap in the academic literature in this field. The authors confirm that internet voting was most cost-efficient voting channel offered to Estonian voters.

IMPACT

This paper presents a new, proven methodology for calculating the cost-efficiencies of various ways of voting. The authors provide rare data on electoral costs, including costs ranging from stationery to depreciation costs and provide a detailed cost breakdown of activities. The findings will have direct practical implications for electoral management bodies and policy-makers around the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Activity-based costing
• convenience voting
• cost-efficiency
• elections
• internet voting
• multi-channel elections
• voting

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Estonian Research Council (PUT 1361), by Tallinn University of Technology Startup Funding for DigiGovLab (BVH2), and by the European Commission (OpenGovIntelligence H2020 Grant 693849). We would like to thank to the State Electoral Office of Estonia for supporting our project, Wolfgang Drechsler for his valuable feedback, Breck Shuyler and Radu Antonio Serrano for their collaboration in the BPMN modelling, Jorge Lheureux de Freitas for his support in the collection of data and David Jiménez Guillemat for his support with graphic design. Finally, we are grateful to Public Money & Management’s reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).