Design imperatives for e-voting as a sociotechnical system

There are a number of past and ongoing research efforts on the development of e-voting systems. These works largely focus on requirements, technical specification and implementation technologies to support different aspects of the elections from registration and verification through balloting to counting and result. A major shortcoming of these studies is their sole focus on technical aspect of e-voting solution without significant attention paid to human and environment factors that arguably determine the successful adoption of such e-voting solutions. This paper addresses this design gap in three steps. First, it provides a conceptualization of e-voting system as a socio-technical system. Second, it elaborates a set of principles to guide a sociotechnical design for e-voting. Third, it provides concrete implications of these principles. The paper concludes on the pragmatics of this approach to e-voting adoption particularly in environment such as Nigeria.