Robert Krimmer

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Digital Transformation Expert at E-Voting.CC

This dissertation’s aim is to contribute to the research that addresses the challenge of ensuring effective participation in decision-making procedures using information and communication technologies (ICT) in twenty-first century democracies, which are assumed to be the best form of government available (UN 1945; EU 1993). The use of ICT in electi...

Electronic Transactions over the Internet, particularly using the World Wide Web have become an integral part of economic life. Recently also the public sector has started to use the new medium for its administrative processes. This paper analyses several approaches to implement an electronic voting system and discusses them with a view to voter an...

This article delves into the concept of the Real-Time Economy (RTE), defined as a joint digital ecosystem where economic and administrative transactions between private and public actors take place as close to real-time as possible. It is an emerging economic paradigm characterized by instantaneous (or near-instantaneous) data exchange, real-time d...

A representative study came to the conclusion that more than 63% of German voters would have like to cast their vote for the federal election in 2021 online. In this paper, we aimed to investigate why Germans might be in favour or against online voting, conducting a online survey. We furthermore aimed to study the reactions of people being in favor...

This paper develops functionalities for a digital collaborative platform, called the Digital Silver Hub (DSH), which aims to serve as an ecosystem for the quadruple helix actors (private sector, public sector, academic institutions, and senior citizens) to participate in knowledge exchange, collaboration and co-creation of innovative technological...

The paper focuses on the Guidelines on the use of ICT in electoral processes which the Council of Europe published in 2022. The paper describes the development process and the considered input. It also provides a summary of the content and explains those concepts that are new or different compared to previous or related guidelines. Finally the limi...

Der Verwaltungskontext in Deutschland wird in Forschung und Praxis oft als zu speziell angesehen, als dass Deutschland von Ländern wie Estland etwas über die digitale Transformation der Verwaltung lernen könnte. Der Beitrag hinterfragt, ob das wirklich stimmt. Insgesamt mehr als 900 deutsche Delegationen haben inzwischen das e-Briefing Center in Es...

In the management of national electronic identity (eID) infrastructure, cooperation between public and private parties becomes more and more important, as the mutual dependencies between the provision of e-services and the provision of the national public key infrastructure (PKI) continuously increases. Yet, it is not clear which key factors affect...

This volume contains papers presented at E-Vote-ID 2022, the Seventh International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting, held during October 4–7, 2022. This was the first in-person conference following the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as such, it was a very special event for the community since we returned to the traditional venue in Bregenz, Austria....

In times where personal contacts must be reduced and in-person meetings and appointments have become difficult, electronic services are continuously gaining relevance. This especially applies to the public-sector domain, where e-government services have become a main pillar for the interaction between citizens and public administrations. In the Eur...

This volume contains papers presented at E-Vote-ID 2022, the Seventh International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting, held during October 4–7, 2022. This was the first inperson conference following the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as such, it was a very special event for the community since we returned to the traditional venue in Bregenz, Austria. T...

The aim of the paper is to summarize and critically discuss the situation in Germany concerning electronic voting.

Strengthening democracy and electoral processes in the era of social media and Artificial Intelligence Democracy requires free, periodic, transparent, and inclusive elections. Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the right to political participation are also critical to societies ruled by the respect of human rights. In today’s rapidly...

With the increasing population of the silver economy, many potential economic opportunities appear, in particular, in developed countries. Recently, the European Union and the Baltic Sea Region have been very active with their research on active aging and to tackle the challenges arising from the exponentially increasing ageing population. The OSIR...

With the increasing population of the silver economy, many potential economic opportunities appear, in particular, in developed countries. Recently, the European Union and the Baltic Sea Region have been very active with their research on active aging and to tackle the challenges arising from the exponentially increasing ageing population. The OSIR...

COVID-19 is regarded as a major driver for digital transformation of our society and potentially as a boost for further digital single market integration. From the current perspective, pandemics cannot be avoided, but fully enabled digital societies will be better prepared to cope with them in future. This will, however, require reliable digital in...

Digital disruptions caused by use of technologies like social media arguably present a formidable challenge to democratic values and in-turn to Collective Intelligence (CI or “wisdom-of-crowd”), which the former is an emblem of. These challenges such as misinformation, partisan bias, polarization, and rising mistrust in institutions (incl. mainstre...

This volume contains papers presented at E-Vote-ID 2021, the Sixth International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting, held during October 5-8, 2021. Due to the extraordinary situation provoked by Covid-19 Pandemic, the conference is held online for second consecutive edition, instead of in the traditional venue in Bregenz, Austria. E-Vote-ID Conf...

Seit Beginn der Pandemie stehen viele Institutionen (inkl. Vereinen, Unternehmen und Behörden) vor der Frage, wie sie ihre Wahlen und geheimen Abstimmungen organisieren sollen – ohne die Gesundheit der Wähler*innen und Wahlhelfer*innen zu gefährden. Einige Wahlverantwortliche haben sich für die Durchführung von Online-Wahlen bzw. digitalen Abstimmu...

This paper investigates the drivers and barriers of internet voting and the implications of a global pandemic for the development of the respective technology. In contrast to the expected uptake in the early 2000s of internet voting, the technology is still rather seldomly used in election systems around the world. The paper at hand explores the di...

Better targeted and more personalized service offering to citizens has the potential to make state-citizen interactions more seamless, reduce inefficiencies in service provision, and lower barriers to service access for the less informed and disadvantaged social groups. What constitutes personalization and how the service offering can be customized...

The recent policy and regulatory initiatives of the EU, such as Digital Single Market Strategy, Single Digital Gateway, European Interoperability Framework and eIDAS, identify the need for digital cross-border integration in the EU. The achievement of the digital single market within the EU is challenging governments at all levels to transform or u...

The Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR) and the underlying Once-Only Principle (OOP) outline that businesses and citizens in contact with public administrations have to provide data only once. The chapter gives an overview based on the findings of the EU-funded “The Once-Only Principle Project (TOOP)”. The authors summarise the developments re...

The Single Market is one of the cornerstones of the European Union. The idea to transform it into a Digital Single Market (DSM) was outlined several years ago. The EU has started different initiatives to support this transformation process. One of them is the program Horizon 2020 to support the process from a technical point of view. In parallel to...

The once-only principle (OOP) aims to reduce interactions between citizens and governments, but many factors challenge its cross-border implementation. Building on the results of the “The Once-Only Principle Project” (TOOP, 2017–2021), an analysis was undertaken of the factors that either support or hinder implementation of the cross-border OOP. Fi...

The “digital transformation” is perceived as the key enabler for increasing wealth and well-being by politics, media and the citizens alike. In the same vein, digital government steadily receives more and more attention. Digital government gives rise to complex, large-scale state-level system landscapes consisting of many players and technological...

Election reform, caused by the decline of democratic participation and postponement of elections due to the Covid19 pandemic, gave rise to the spread of convenience voting channels all around the world. In the current times, convenience voting channels become more and more digitalized (not the least because of Covid19), resulting in electronic and...

The "digital transformation" is perceived as the key enabler for increasing wealth and well-being by politics, media and the citizens alike. In the same vein, digital government steadily receives more and more attention. Digital government gives rise to complex, large-scale state-level system landscapes consisting of many players and technological...

This open access State-of-the-Art Survey describes and documents the developments and results of the Once-Only Principle Project (TOOP). The Once-Only Principle (OOP) is part of the seven underlying principles of the eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020. It aims to make the government more effective and to reduce administrative burdens by asking citi...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Electronic Voting, E-Vote-ID 2021, held online -due to COVID -19- in Bregenz, Austria, in October 2021. The 14 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. The conference collected the most relevant debates on the development of Electroni...

The original version of the cover and book was revised. The seventh editor name has been updated.

Population grow and rapid urbanization generate several consequences such as congestion, air, water and urban pollution, health issues, social inequality, natural resource shortage, among others. These challenges added to the technological development and digitalization of governments motivated new urbanization models relying on the use of technolo...

Those two voting channels accounted for above 80% of ballots cast, while the other eight voting channels-for 20%. The least cost-efficient voting channel, in the Estonian setting, is postal voting due to high both fixed and varied costs, and low usage rate of postal voting. The similar trend has been observed in other countries [2]. What drives the...

The Åland Islands spent years preparing an internet voting system, to be implemented for the first time in October 2019 for Parliamentary Elections. Despite this, the project was canceled the evening before the expected release date. In this paper, we explore the causes of this failure using a two-pronged approach including Information System failu...

This volume contains papers presented at the 5th International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID 2020), held during October 6–9, 2020. Due to the extraordinary situation provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was held online during this edition, instead of at the traditional venue in Bregenz, Austria. The E-Vote-ID confere...

This volume contains papers presented at the 5th InternationalJoint Conference on Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID 2020), held during October 6-9, 2020. Due to the extraordinary situation provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference was held online during this edition, instead of at the traditional venue in Bregenz, Austria. The E-Vote-ID conferen...

New ways of voting in elections are being sought by electoral administrations worldwide who want to reverse declining voter turnouts without increasing electoral budgets. This paper presents a novel approach to cost accounting for multi-channel elections based on local elections in Estonia. By doing so, it addresses an important gap in the academic...

Una vez completado el análisis de algunos supuestos de hecho españoles, el libro incorpora dos contribuciones internacionales. La primera de ellas, a cargo de David DUEÑAS-CID y Robert KRIMMER (Taltech / Tallinn University of Technology) expone la situación en este país báltico, a la sazón uno de los referentes indiscutibles del voto por internet a...

Die öffentliche Verwaltung steht vor der großen Herausforderung, Verwaltungsservices künftig online zur Verfügung zu stellen und die damit verbundenen Geschäftsprozesse zu digitalisieren. Die rechtlichen Rahmen bilden das Onlinezugangsgesetz (OZG) sowie die Verordnung über das einheitliche digitale Zugangstor für EU-Staaten (SDGR). Der Beitrag zeig...

This volume contains papers presented at E-Vote-ID 2019, the Fourth International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting, held during October 1-4, 2019, in Bregenz, Austria. It resulted from the merging of EVOTE and Vote-ID and counting up to 15 years since the �rst E-Vote conference in Austria. Since the �rst conference in 2004, over 1000 experts h...

The Åland Islands will use Internet Voting for the first time for expatriate voters at the next Parliamentary Elections, to be held in October 2019. This electoral modernization is a response to the need detected to introduce changes in order to better integrate expatriate voters and the younger generations into the electoral system, and represents...

This opening article introduces the Fourth International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting and, on the occasion of the 15 years since the first E-Vote conference in Austria, presents an analysis of the network of co-authorships based on the books published by the Electronic Voting Conference Series. The goal of the analysis is to provide an ove...

This workshop of the CAP4CITY (Erasmus+ Strengthening Governance Capacity for Smart Sustainable Cities) project is to promote and stimulate the discussion and networking in the area of Digital Government. Smart Sustainable Cities and related concepts of Digital, Intelligent and Smart Cities represent a progression of how cities around the world app...

This research focuses on the interrelationship between international standards and e-voting projects. With the rise of e-government activities, a multitude of new international standards is discussed or adopted in conjunction with such innovative reform steps. In order to gain a perception which role international standards dealing with legal, orga...

This chapter aims to demonstrate and understand how open government data can generate public value by allowing any actor to co-create an open government data-driven public service. The chapter takes a holistic approach to understanding open government data-driven co-creation and follows a content-context-process approach for the framework developme...

Welfare sectors across the world are facing the need to balance the contrast between economic pressures due to demographic changes and peoples’ rising expectations of receiving services that are transparent; timely and tailored to citizens’ habits and needs. This means that governments are pressured to look for new ways to deliver public services....

In this contribution we structure the use of new voting technologies in elections in the Northern hemisphere in three areas—first which and how technology can be used, and second which motivational factors can be accounted for their use.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Electronic Voting, E-Vote-ID 2019, held in Bregenz, Austria, in October 2019. The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The conference was organized in tracks on security, usability and technical issues, administrative,...

The Vienna Convention has been long enshrined as the cornerstone of modern diplomacy. However, recent technological advances may have shifted this landscape, with international law requiring to adapt in the face of novel and unique challenges. Taking the case of the Estonian Data Embassy in Luxembourg, we assess the applicability of the Vienna Conv...

It is becoming increasingly clear that the concepts of open government data (OGD) and co-creation are related; however, there is currently only limited empirical material available exploring the link between the two. This paper aims to help clarify the relationship between these two concepts by exploring a recently coined phenomenon: OGD-driven co-...

Estonia is often considered as a global leader in digital government. However, when it comes to Open Government Data (OGD), Estonia seems to be far behind many other countries according to international surveys and indices. This paper takes a closer look at the puzzle of Estonia's low OGD maturity against the backdrop of a highly developed e-govern...

We are presenting the results of the CoDE project in this paper, where we investigate the costs per vote of different voting channels in Estonian Local Elections (2017). The elections analyzed involve different processes for casting a vote: Early Voting at County Centers, Advance Voting at County Centers, Advance Voting at Ordinary Voting District...

This volume contains papers presented at E-Vote-ID 2018, the Third International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting, held during October 2–5, 2018, in Bregenz, Austria. It resulted from the merging of EVOTE and Vote-ID. In total, more than 800 experts from over 35 countries have attended the conference series over the last 14 years. This shows t...

This volume contains papers presented at E-Vote-ID 2018. The Third International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting, held during October 2 - 5, 2018, in Bregenz, Austria. It resulted from the merging of EVOTE and Vote-ID. More than 800 experts from over 35 countries have attended the conference series over the last 14 years. This shows that the...

It is believed that co-creation may lead to public service quality improvements, the provision and creation of new and innovative services, and bring public service providers closer to their service users. There has been an increased interest and focus on how new technological innovations are enabling and facilitating co-creation; one such digital...

With the general decline of voter turnout in established democracies around the world, a number of countries have started to look into adding alternative means of voting, including Internet and postal voting, resulting in complex multi-channel elections. Introducing alternative voting channels can help to change the tendency to turnout decline, but...

One of the key obstacles on the way to a full-fledged European digital single market is the administrative burden imposed on companies conducting business activities across country borders. The once-only principle (OOP) states that any standard information that one public administration has already collected should be shared with other public admin...

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have changed many systems substantially in recent decades. The way we interact, the way we do business, the way we share news and many more aspects have been changed. For almost all people on the planet, the way we vote has not yet been impacted at all, or at least not substantially, by these technol...

(The attached article refers to the publication stemming from this conference presentation) This article addresses the issue of electoral costs incurred by Electoral Management Bodies while running multi-channel elections. The focus is on complexity of organization of multichannel elections and cost variation between alternative voting channels. T...

Moving towards the cross-border mobility of e-Government services is a political priority of the European Union, but the provision of such services remains fragmented. This paper builds on the first research results of "The Once-Only Principle Project" (TOOP), launched in 2017 by the European Commission and 51 organizations from 21 European countri...

Linked Open Statistical Data (LOSD) and Open Government Data (OGD) are believed to contain the capability to drive the creation of new and innovative public services and provide increased levels of public value. It has also been proposed that these technologies have the potential to change the relationship between traditional public service provide...

Large amounts of Open Government Data (OGD) have become available and co-created public services have started to emerge, but there is only limited empirical material available on co-created OGD-driven public services. To address this shortcoming and explore the concept of co-created OGD-driven public services the authors conducted an exploratory ca...

The once-only principle (OOP) is a principle which states that public administrations should collect information from citizens and businesses only once, and then share and reuse this information. This is seen as a way to increase government efficiency and reduce the administrative burden of citizens and businesses in their interactions with public...

The once-only principle (OOP) is a principle which states that public administrations should collect information from citizens and businesses only once, and then share and reuse this information. This is seen as a way to increase government efficiency and reduce the administrative burden of citizens and businesses in their interactions with public...

Since the introduction of verifiability in the online government elections of Norway in 2011, different governments have followed similar steps and have implemented these properties in their voting systems. However, not all the systems have adopted the same levels of verifiability nor the same range of cryptographic mechanisms. For instance, Estoni...

Voting is an important part of electronic participation whenever it comes to finding a common opinion among the many participants. The impact of the voting result on the outcome of the e-participation process might differ a lot as voting can relate to approving, polling or co-decision making. The greater the impact of the electronic voting on the o...

We discuss a new type of attack on voting systems that in contrast to attacks described in the literature does not disrupt the expected behavior of the voting system itself. Instead the attack abuses the normal functionality to link the tallying of the election to disclosing sensitive information assumed to be held by the adversary. Thus the attack...

This dissertation aims to investigate the origins of Internet voting, analyze several deployments of Internet voting technology in Austria and identify – based on these accumulated experiences – building blocks that can be useful in decision-making on and planning of future uses of Internet voting technology within Austria and throughout the world....

Governments are creating and maintaining increasing amounts of data, and, recently, releasing data as open government data. As the amount of data available increases, so to should the exploitation of this data. However, this potential currently seems to be unexploited. Since exploiting open government data has the potential to create new public val...

Governments are creating and maintaining increasing amounts of data, and, recently, releasing data as open government data. As the amount of data available increases, so too should the exploitation of this data. However, this potential currently seems to be unexploited. Since exploiting open government data has the potential to create new public va...

The Once-Once Principle (OOP) suggests that citizens and businesses should have the right to supply information only once to a public administration. It would then be the responsibility of public administration offices to take all necessary actions in order to internally share this data by respecting the relevant data protection rules. The overall...