Internet Voting: Fatally Torn Between Conflicting Goals?

More than a decade after the first enthusiastic attempts at deploying Internet voting, there is still only a single case of continued adoption for the election of a political body. In this paper we illustrate the motivations behind the apparent failure of a process that, at a first sight, looks desirable for many reasons. We analyze the most relevant efforts in the field, which can be grouped in two main lines: those grounded on a strong formal foundation, and those designed to achieve maximum participation. From the analysis, we derive a set of desirable features, classify the systems according to their ability to achieve them, and conclude that no system is currently able to strike a convincingly positive balance between them.