Acceptance of voting technology: between confidence and trust

Social aspects of security of information systems are often discussed in terms of “actual security��? and “perceived security��?. This may lead to the hypothesis that e-voting is controversial because in paper voting, actual and perceived security coincide, whereas they do not in electronic systems. In this paper, we argue that the distinction between actual and perceived security is problematic from a philosophical perspective, and we develop an alternative approach, based on the notion of trust. We investigate the different meanings of this notion in computer science, and link these to the philosophical work of Luhmann, who distinguishes between familiarity, confidence and trust. This analysis yields several useful distinctions for discussing trust relations with respect to information technology. We apply our framework to electronic voting, and propose some hypotheses that can possibly explain the smooth introduction of electronic voting machines in the Netherlands in the early nineties.