Digital Unbounding of the Polling Booth: Ethnography in Small Places

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Abstract

This article discusses how a small place – the polling booth – can be bounded as an ethnographic site with reference to the political and democratic event that it is supposed to facilitate. Concerns about the socio-material bounding of the booth form the main empirical case – a debate, which recently occurred in Denmark when the government proposed to digitalise voting. Digitalisation here became a controversy because of the potential illicit influences that computer experts argued would enter the polling booth and challenge the secrecy and the privacy of the vote, the transparency of the electoral process, and thus the electoral enactment of democracy itself. In this way the polling booth potentially works as an ethnographic entry point for following shifts in contemporary debates
Original languageEnglish
JournalEthnos
Pages (from-to)1-16
Number of pages16
ISSN0014-1844
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • democracy
  • event
  • place
  • elections
  • digitalisation
  • ethnography

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