Electronic voting or e-voting is a way to get the people=s vote electronically. There are different kinds of electronic voting systems used in several countries around the world. Most of these systems adapt existent technologies or develop specific technologies to be used for electoral purposes.
The main types of electronic voting systems include:
Electronic voting systems have been in use since the 1960s, with the introduction n the market of the punch card systems, followed much later by the optical scanning systems, the DRE and the Internet.
Electronic voting machines are used on a large scale in Belgium, Brazil, India, Venezuela and the United States among others. Although there is a trend for adopting this technology there are still many countries that prefer hand-marked and manually counted paper ballots.
While the efficiency of some of these electronic systems is not disputed they have suffered from different degrees of security problems as well as a perception that they are not reliable and that they can introduce substantial counting errors. One of its main advantages though, it is that facilitates voting access to persons with disabilities.
