Trusting elections: complexities and risks of digital voting in Denmark

Abstract

ABSTRACT It is often said that election processes depend on trust for their legitimacy. Trust is therefore crucial to the sustainability of democracy. It also seems clear that patterns and forms of trust in Western democracies are changing in tandem with digitalization. This paper explores some possible inflections of the concept of trust in the ‘age of digitalization’ by examining its articulation by computer scientists doing research on digital voting and by contrasting these articulations with a Science and Technology Studies (STS) analysis of trust in the Danish voting process. The motivation for characterizing and discussing these views of trust, is that it matters deeply how trust is conceptualized in relation to voting, democracy and beyond, and that today computer science as an engineering, scientific and intellectual field increasingly affects how we perceive of trust – indeed, how we organize social life and come to think about the world we live in. If Digitalization appears to be implicated in the current transformation of trust, then the questions of how trust is defined, by whom, and with what implications are open and acute matters in need of more general awareness and careful attentention.