The Austrian Parliament invited experts on e-voting out of politics and science as well as social scientists to discuss electronic voting as a future topic for Austria.

Michael Spindelegger, Vice-President of the Austrian Nationalrat and Karin Hakl, speaker of the Austrian people party (ÖVP) started with an enthusiastic talk about the necessity to participate in elections and the task of the state to offer possibilities to do so.

For Robert Stein, vice-chairman of the Austrian election management board the introduction of postal voting was a necessary act that has devitalized important arguments against e-voting. He promoted the need of legal and technical standards as well as pilot tests but emphasized that e-voting could be in use in Austria in the next few years. As Robert Krimmer, director of E-Voting.CC explained the ÖH-election 2009 with e-voting as an additional voting channel will be such a pilot test and bring important experiences in the use of e-voting for Austria. By observing other countries in the use of e-voting Austria could also benefit. Uwe Serdült, Vice director of the Institute for Direct Democracy in Zurich reported how the Swiss cantons deal with challenges by using e-voting in elections.

Helene Karmasin, director of Karmasin Motivforschung emphasized that grass-roots politics would be necessary to address “tomorrow’s clients”. The introduction of e-voting would be a clear signal to this special “Lebenswelt”. According to latest polls 30% of the Austrians have a positive emotional attitude towards e-voting. Despite this positive trend the participants agreed on that it is necessary to support an open discussion on trust and security matters as well as to strengthen political education amongst e-voting.

Download Robert Krimmer's slides here.