As online voting is not super widespread, the data and research we have on it are also quite limited. But the numbers and the few European countries which have tried to experiment with online voting do provide some insights on why online voting isn’t more popular in Europe and globally.

eVoting vs iVoting

Before going any further, it's worth clearing up a confusion that is at the foundation of almost every public debate on this topic. E-voting and online voting  are not the same thing . eVoting is the umbrella term that covers touchscreen machines at polling stations, ballot scanners, basically any electronic component in the voting process and more. The EU's own  2018 study on remote voting  mapped seven different methods, only one of which is internet voting.  Online voting, or iVoting, is a specific type of electronic voting, meaning casting your ballot remotely via the internet, from any device, wherever you happen to be.

The distinction matters because the argument in this piece about participation only really applies to the iVoting. Swapping a paper ballot for a touchscreen at the same polling station doesn't remove any barriers. It just digitises the finish line of the same trip. When we talk about whether technology can bring young people into the democratic process, we're talking specifically about the ability to vote without a commute. 

Twenty years of European data on online voting

It’s not surprising that some European countries have been experimenting with online voting. Estonia launched iVoting in 2005 and has run it in every national election since. Usage climbed from under 2% to 51% by 2023, a genuine success story in adoption terms. The system sits on top of a universal digital ID infrastructure where citizens already bank, sign contracts, and access medical records online. Voting became just another service within a digital ecosystem people already trusted. But if we dig deeper we can see more nuances.  Leo Fel's very recent doctoral dissertation, a comparative study of iVoting across five European democracies , argues that Estonian iVoting was essentially a solution in search of a problem. The e-ID card had been rolled out but was underused, and iVoting gave it a concrete, high-visibility purpose. The various benefits attached to it, higher turnout, more young voters, a more efficient electoral administration, were in many ways retrospective justifications rather than the original driving force.

And those promised benefits largely didn't materialise. Research covering eleven Estonian elections found that online voting mostly shifted existing voters to a new channel rather than pulling in new ones. It was a substitution effect, not a mobilisation effect: more recent literature on the topic (e.g. Petitpas et al. 2021) mentions that while online voting didn’t bring in new demographics, its ‘substitution effect’ managed to turn some former postal voters into internet voters. In Estonia, the heaviest users of iVoting weren’t teenagers, but middle-aged voters. Young Estonian first-time voters actually prefer to experience voting on paper, treating the polling station as the "real" way to do it. In Norway's iVoting trials, young people said the same thing. When given the choice between voting online and being allowed to vote at 16, the voting age mattered far more to them than the method. 

Other countries tell equally insightful stories, though each for different reasons. Fel's research shows that there is no single factor that explains why iVoting takes root in one country and gets abandoned in another. Instead, it's a combination of conditions: the right problem framing, path dependency from existing voting traditions, political will from key actors, a compelling narrative, and a favourable policy window. All five need to align, and they rarely do. Switzerland has been running online voting trials since 2003, but suspended them in 2019 after academic experts found serious vulnerabilities in the published source code of its iVoting system. They resumed cautiously in 2023, and currently only four cantons participate. Crucially, the Swiss already had widespread and convenient postal voting, which meant that for domestic voters, iVoting solved a problem that didn't really exist. The demand came primarily from expatriates, not from young people.  Norway piloted online voting in 2011 and 2013 , but the Government dropped the programme because voters were afraid their votes would become public. 

Another European country, the Netherlands, abandoned its experiments after a  voting machine scandal  created such risk-aversion around electronic voting that iVoting became politically radioactive. France  adopted iVoting , but only for its diaspora in legislative and consular elections.

Leo Fel’s dissertation claims that the early 2000s iVoting rush is over. Today's Europe is more cautious, more focused on electoral integrity, and less willing to experiment without a strong justification. Any new iVoting project now requires a much stronger case than it would have a quarter century ago.

Trust and political will are the real infrastructure

Studies (e.g. Trechsel 2007; Vassil et al. 2016) show that removing logistical barriers does not necessarily address deeper causes of youth abstention. Dr Alexander Trechsel, Professor of Political Science at the University of Lucerne and one of the most prominent researchers on internet voting in Europe, mentions that the literature in the field points to a lack of political will, security concerns, a lack of legal bases as reasons for not adopting iVoting. He adds that so far, no clear evidence for massive gains in turnout numbers. "It is futile to promise direct, positive effects on turnout."

Technology is never just technology. Estonia's iVoting works to an extent because digital trust was slowly built over two decades through e-governance, digital ID, and transparent systems. Countries that rushed the technology without first building that foundation pulled back. This is perhaps the most underappreciated lesson from the European experiments so far.

Trechsel is very insistent on this point: "Trust is quintessential. Trust in the political institutions, the functioning of elections, security of the system. That's actually not different from any other form of voting, where trust in the process needs to be very high in order for the election results to be accepted not only by the winners, but above all by the losers." Dr Trechsel says transparency and clear communication by the state play important roles in trust building.

And trust, once earned, doesn't stick around automatically. Even in Estonia, reported distrust reached 40% of the population after the 2023 elections, the very same elections where online voting hit its record high at 51%. Trust is volatile and fragile, and once it's gone, it's quite difficult to rebuild.

Political will is the other precondition that doesn't get enough attention in this debate. The  EU's 2018 Council decision  already allows member states to provide internet voting for European Parliament elections, but almost no one has moved on it. Without sustained commitment across multiple governments and electoral cycles, the technology will never mature past the pilot stage.

The real problem isn't the ballot box

Here's the realisation that anyone working in youth participation needs to sit with: the 2024 EP election data shows that only 36% of under-25s voted in the 2024 European Parliament elections, down from 42% in 2019, despite this being the most digitally connected generation ever. The problem was never that young people couldn't physically reach a polling station.  Eurobarometer data  shows the top barriers were disinterest in politics and lack of motivation to vote, not logistics.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Trechsel doesn't mince words about the deeper problem: "Media consumption shows dramatic shifts towards a young audience that is news-deprived, meaning that these people do not consume any news anymore, including political ones. They are those who participate the least, know the least about politics and are simply not interested anymore. They amuse themselves on social media, but politics is none of their concern. Even iVoting won't fix this problem."

That said, online voting does have real potential for specific groups where physical access genuinely is the barrier: expatriate voters, students registered away from home, disabled citizens, people in remote areas. 

What to take from all this

Drawing on the literature, my own experience and the conversation with Professor Trechsel, here's what practitioners in democratic participation and youth engagement should keep in mind.

Don't sell online voting as a turnout silver bullet: The evidence from two decades of European experimentation is consistent in the takeaway that online voting is a convenience upgrade for people already inclined to vote, not a tool that converts non-voters into voters. 

Invest in trust before you invest in technology: Any country considering online voting needs to first measure whether voters actually want it and whether political stakeholders will sustain commitment beyond one electoral cycle. Dr Trechsel recommends starting with trials and only depending on the outcome, proceed to a full roll-out.

Embed online voting in a broader strategy: On its own, it won't move the needle on youth disengagement. Young people must feel represented, motivated, or connected to the process. Paired with digital civic education, easier registration, and crucially, candidates and issues that young people feel are worth turning out for, it can become one useful piece of a larger puzzle of democratic participation.

Security comes first: Dr Trechsel thinks we will never reach a perfect balance in the convenience vs security debate, but ballot secrecy and security need to come first. "If a technological solution offers this, then one can go for it. If not, I would advise against it." 

Much like my interlocutor for this piece, I think that online voting will inevitably become the new norm, but it might not happen as quickly as we think. The honest conclusion is that online voting should be part of the conversation about democratic engagement, but it shouldn't be the whole conversation. Treating it as a digital fix for a fundamentally political problem is the surest way to end up disappointed. Voters must have a choice on how they can vote, and I doubt that in-person voting would be fully substituted. After all, politics is also about some theatrics and imagery, and online voting will never be able to provide that.

As for how else we can influence youth participation patterns in voting, Dr Trechsel, as the founder of the  EU&I voting advice application , considers voter information tools to be an interesting instrument. "What research shows so far is that voting advice applications (VAAs) can indeed foster political interest, knowledge and even engagement. They can provoque more nuanced forms of voting, based on a better quality of the information at hand," he says.