The project has achieved important innovations on several fronts:
1. REDEM has released 5 key reports which provide unique overviews on various aspects related to ethical voting challenges:
a. A first report provides a synthesis of democratic political systems and institutions in Europe and argues for the necessity to design electoral institutions which minimize, as far as possible, the ethical burdens of electoral democracy for voters and distribute them more fairly within each country’s population.
b. A second report discusses the ethically relevant dimensions of different election types, exemplifies their impact on elections and presents some considerations on heuristic shortcuts that might help voters faced with the ethical challenges of voting.
c. A third report presents a synthesis of different philosophical conceptions of democracy and their implications for the ethics of electoral participation. The report shows that existing research on the ethics of voting has paid insufficient attention to minimalist, deliberative, and counter-majoritarian conceptions of democracy and argues that a voting ethics compatible with these views of democracy will need to treat voters as one element within a complex political structure, and tailor any ethical prescriptions and permissions in light of voters’ distinctive place within democracy.
d. A fourth report offers a detailed synthetic overview on the challenges facing democracy in Europe, based on a comprehensive review of academic sources, policy briefs and media articles, with special attention to the interval 2019-2021. This report offers a roadmap to study challenges that face European countries taken collectively and individually.
e. A fifth report describes the ethical considerations relevant to voter choices, including reasons relevant to whether to vote and, if one votes, what criteria one should take into account. It compares and contrasts a voter’s perspective on the ethics of voting with alternative perspectives (those of politicians, of social scientists) and shows that the former are not reducible to the latter. The report highlights the need to pay attention to the moral and political dilemmas that arise from the different democratic functions that elections can serve.
2. REDEM has succeeded in creating a large and heterogeneous network of organisations capable of creating, promoting and supporting solutions to the ethical challenges of voting. True to its mission as a coordination and support action, REDEM brings together research groups, electoral institutions, civil society organisations, electoral policy-making units at national and European level and civic tech.
3. In response to the special conditions created by the Covid-19 pandemic, the project consortium has succeeded in creating a functional organisation platform which has allowed all activities to be transferred and to be implemented in a remote interaction mode. The remote collaboration framework created by REDEM is based on innovative technical solutions and has been instrumental in the creation of the extended and viable network of external partners described above which currently reaches tens of organisations throughout Europe.
4. REDEM has been one of the very few projects which in its first 18 months has supported a civic tech start-up - todayIvote - to get off the ground and be included in a prestigious accelerator programme.
