A Social Informatics Approach to Studying Remote Electronic Voting (in Romanian)

There is a lot of speculation about the social changes that might arise when new applications like Remote Electronic Voting (REV) systems are to become widespread. Questions about the consequences of new technologies are often posed in a very black and white manner. However, life is not that simple, and usually there are no clear-cut answers. Therefore, the social changes that might occur because of the implementation of new and complex information and communication technologies (ICTs) need to be analytically and empirically examined. In our research we have used a Social Informatics approach to study the technical, as well as the political, social, cultural and behavioural aspects which are related to the development and implementation of remote e-voting systems. The results show that the Social Informatics approach has been very useful to point out the many non-technical issues that need to be considered in the systems design process in order to develop the technology in a responsible way. [The English version of this paper is available on request]