Building Trust for Sample Voting

This article explores how to build popular trust for voting systems that rely heavily on statistical tools, as they are generally counter-intuitive to the average citizen (and even to experts). By trying out the voting system in public and letting people tinker with it, a first level of familiarity can be achieved. Preliminary results from real-world experiments seem encouraging and point out the importance of psychological and sociological factors in election organization as well as the influence of user interface design. To go further, integration into a larger debating platform held by a national party could give first-hand experience to the majority of the people, and would progressively build trust as the political stakes grow higher. Finally, the authors look into how different e-democratic tools could interact in a mutually beneficial manner.