In eight official votes between January 2003 and April 2005 authorities in Geneva invited up to 90 ,000 citizens to test a remote e‑Voting system as a complement to traditional voting methods. Multidisciplinary teams composed of legal, political, PR, security and computer science specialists, strongly supported by the Government, participated in creating the system which will be appraised by the Geneva Parliament en 2006. This paper reports on the project, its results in terms of numbers and socio‑political profile of e‑Voters, and its success factors. All three authors were directly or indirectly involved in the project from the beginning and are currently working on the deployment of Geneva's e‑ Government platform.

Analysis of the profile and motives of internet voting users in Geneva (Switzerland) shows that the common explanations of political participation ignore a subjective — or affective — dimension of political participation. This emotional dimension is the driver of internet vote use. Coincidentally, iVoting is mostly used by citizens who describe themselves as irregular voters or abstainers. This points to invisible barriers to political participation, as these citizens do not lack resources or knowledge, but the desire to participate by the common paper‑based channels. For them, political participation is a self‑centered process. Ultimately, this reflects a deep shift in the political life, from class‑based choices to individual choices in the realm of public affairs. The present‑day common good is defined by an aggregation of individual wills.