M-voting in developing countries: Findings from Uganda Emmanuel Eilu, Rehema Baguma and John Sören Pettersson In the last two decades, competitive elections have become the standard in a number of African countries. Free and fair elections have not only helped consolidate emerging democratic institutions, but also improved projection for greater economic and political development. In other cases, such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, plausible elections have shaped the route for national reconciliation and a return to democratic rule after years of armed conflict and civil war (CAE, 2009). However, there has been a decline in voter turnout in many developing countries. The African continent has the lowest voter turnout in the world with an average of 65 per cent (Vergne, 2009). The 2005 referendum in Uganda had a voter turnout of only 47 per cent (Petersen, 2006), while, in the 2011 presidential elections in Uganda, more than 40 per cent of the registered 13.5 million voters did not turn up to vote (Oola, 2011; Young, 2005). The reasons for low voter turnout in developing countries range from violence, intimidation and rigging, to voter apathy and election delays (Pande, 2011). Vergne (2009) suggests that this is problematic as low voter turnout creates very weak incentives for politicians to adopt or implement policies in the public interest. There is therefore a need to find ways of improving voter turnout in developing countries. The joint EU-UNDP Task Force on Electoral Assistance calls for new and innovative ways of integrating attractive and acceptable mobile technologies into sensitive processes like national voting. In this article, we report results from a survey based on strategies for persuasive design and technology acceptance analysis that can influence perceptions, views and attitudes towards using mobile phones as devices for national voting. Despite all the opportunities mobile phones provide as a voting tool over other information and communications technologies (ICTs), they have failed to gain much acceptance as an electronicvoting tool in developing countries. For instance, surveys carried out in Uganda and Malaysia revealed that close to 60 and 50 per cent of survey participants, respectively, did not agree to use their mobile phones for voting (Eilu and Baguma, 2013; Sin et al., 2008). The major concern is about keeping the ballot secure over the GSM operator. According to the evidence presented by Kailasam (2010), these technical issues may in fact be relatively simple to overcome, although overcoming voters’ negative perceptions and attitudes towards using mobile phones as a voting tool is thought to be more problematic. Technology acceptance design is an adoption of the theory of reasoned action (TRA) originally proposed by D. F. Davies (1989) and persuasive technology design proposed by Fogg (2004) that is specifically tailored for modelling user acceptance of information systems/technology. In 2013, two and a half years after Uganda’s last general elections, we carried out a study in Uganda to assess citizen perceptions and interests towards using their mobile phones to vote. Our results revealed that close to 60 per cent of those who owned mobile phones were not willing to use them to vote, with participants citing a number of political, technological, social and cultural reasons for this (Eilu and Baguma, 2013). Methodology Technology acceptance principles and persuasive technology design principles were used to design the questionnaire. The respondents in the survey were eligible voters of different demographic attributes in urban, peri-urban and rural areas of three districts in Uganda. The three districts were Soroti, Serere and Kumi in Eastern Uganda. Each of these districts was chosen because the urban, peri-urban and rural settings were clearly defined and the respondents were of different political affiliations. In addition, they could easily be accessed by the investigators with minimal financial resources. The study used a quantitative approach where 900 questionnaires were given to respondents of different age groups (from 18 and above), genders, literacy levels, income levels, occupations and types of mobile phone owned. Out of 900 questionnaires, 786 were fully filled out and returned for analysis, making an 86.9 per cent response rate. The completion of these questionnaires was entirely voluntary and responses were anonymous. Descriptive statistics were used to present general results on the extent to which persuasive and acceptance design principles could contribute to increased acceptance and usage of mobile phones in voting. Cross tabulation was used to determine the percentage of respondents who did not agree to use their mobile phones for voting but would be encouraged to do so if particular design factors were met. The study used ‘agreement continua’ to determine the response of participants on a variety of persuasive and acceptance design questions and statements. Agreement continua are questions that require the respondent to agree or disagree (depending on the scale) with given statements. For this study, the questionnaires were designed based on a seven-item Likert scale (strongly agree, agree, somewhat agree, neutral, somewhat disagree, disagree, strongly disagree). In order to simplify the presentation of results, the study computed results in the form of agree, neutral and The following article is abbreviated from: Eilu, E., Baguma, R. and Pettersson, J. S., 2014. ‘Persuasion and acceptance of mobile phones as a voting tool in developing countries’. In: I. Niang, C. Scharff and C. Wamala, 2014. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on M4D Mobile Communication for Development. Karlstad: Karlstad University, pp. 83–94. Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2014/15 25
CEP template 2012
To see the actual publication please follow the link above