Electronic voting (also known as e-voting) is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or take care of casting and counting ballots.

Depending on the particular implementation, e-voting may use standalone electronic voting machines (also called EVM) or computers connected to the Internet (online voting). It may encompass a range of Internet services, from basic transmission of tabulated results to full-function online voting through common connectable household devices. The degree of automation may be limited to marking a paper ballot, or may be a comprehensive system of vote input, vote recording, data encryption and transmission to servers, and consolidation and tabulation of election results.

A worthy e-voting system must perform most of these tasks while complying with a set of standards established by regulatory bodies, and must also be capable to deal successfully with strong requirements associated with security, accuracy, integrity, swiftness, privacy, auditability, accessibility, cost-effectiveness, scalability and ecological sustainability.

Electronic voting technology can include punched cards, optical scan voting systems and specialized voting kiosks (including self-contained direct-recording electronic voting systems, or DRE). It can also involve transmission of ballots and votes via telephones, private computer networks, or the Internet.

In general, two main types of e-voting can be identified:

• e-voting which is physically supervised by representatives of governmental or independent electoral authorities (e.g. electronic voting machines located at polling stations);
• remote e-voting via the Internet (also called i-voting) where the voter submits his or her vote electronically to the election authorities, from any location.