Exploring the attitudes of students in Tertiary and Upper Secondary Education towards Electronic Voting and employment of an electronic voting.

Abstract

The present’s study main aim is to explore/investigate the attitudes of secondary education’s students (upper secondary, Lyceums / High school) and tertiary education’s students (of undergraduate and postgraduate level) towards Electronic Voting. Questionnaires (SEQAEV and TEQAEV) have been designed; undergone QAS-99 control by being administered to control groups (one for each fore mentioned educational level) and tested on a test-retest basis by the control groups as well. In SEQAEV first questionnaire’s filling (QFP-1); participated a total of 135 secondary education’s students. In second phase (QFP-2) a mixed mode voting scheme (running typical and electronic voting concurrently) has been administered and implemented with theme “How secondary education’s students should vote for Students elections in the future”, a total of 285 students participated. In TEQAEV first questionnaire’s filling (QFP-1); participated two different samples. The first sample, a total of 138 tertiary education’s students from different Greek tertiary institutions and the second sample a total of 49 undergraduate students from the Economic Science Department of the University of Macedonia. In TEQAEV second questionnaire’s filling (QFP-2) participated only students, from the first sample, that had accepted to be re-introduced to the TEQAEV filling and also voted on “How tertiary education’s students should vote for Students elections in the future”. As it was expected in both educational level samples, the students displayed to have a fairly positive attitude towards Electronic Voting being implemented on a mixed mode voting scheme, but a scepticism on an only Electronic voting scheme. At the same time they are expecting many things to be done in the directions of security, validity and transparency concerning Electronic voting.