A questionnaire survey of expected characteristics of i-voting systems among students and graduates of agricultural colleges

In order to find out the opinions on the transparency of remote electronic voting, a questionnaire survey was conducted among students and graduates of Czech universities with agricultural specialization. We assume that these are people with higher technical literacy who may be potential users of i-voting systems in farms in the near future. For the composition of the questions, the framework from Agbesi et al. (2023) was used to investigate the dimensions of transparency for Internet voting, supplemented with a few specific questions. Agbesi et al. (2023) identify five core dimensions, namely information accessibility, clarity, monitoring and verifiability, corrective action and testing, these dimensions influence the perception of transparency which in turn influences trust in the overall system. The anonymous questionnaire survey was conducted online via the Dotaznik.czu.cz platform operated by the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague. The invitation to participate in the survey was extended primarily to Czech students and graduates of agricultural universities. The questionnaire survey was conducted from 24 October 2023 to 12 May 2024. The questionnaire was freely accessible on the platform, therefore some respondents may be outside the target population within the limitations of the research. Participants were shown all information including consent to data processing on the homepage of the survey.

Respondents answered on a seven-point Likert scale ranging from Strongly Disagree (0) to Strongly Agree (6) to statements within the five defined dimensions. A total of 177 individuals were recorded as completing the questionnaire. A total of 108 questionnaires were completed in full. Of these, 8 more questionnaires were removed because the control question "This question is not part of the survey and just helps us to detect bots and automated scripts. To confirm that you are a human, please choose 'Strongly agree' here" was answered differently than Strongly agree. Of the 100 responses examined, 64 were male, 35 were female, and 1 respondent did not indicate their gender. 72 respondents are aged 18-30, 18 aged 31-40, 5 aged 41-50, 2 aged 51-60 and 3 aged 61-70. 72 respondents have completed secondary education, 10 have a Bachelor's degree, 12 have a Master's degree and 6 have a PhD.