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Comment by dividuum | Hacker News Reader

Online voting should never be the goal. Computers make things easier and more scalable, but that's not what you want for voting. You want a process that's as distributed as possible so the blast radius of any kind of interference with the voting process itself is as small as possible. It's way harder to change votes at large scale if they have been made on paper. Same with counting: I don't want a 32bit value somewhere counting votes. I want various people manually counting votes and have them observe process. Yes: All that is maybe more expensive than running some website or setting up magic machines, but that's a cost I'm more than willing to take.

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32-bit counters are also fallible. In a 2003 Belgian election, a cosmic ray changed to vote totals due to a bit flip: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bit-f...

As they go into, it's not easy to explain to the public or other election officials how this happened, or even what happened at all.

Excellent example and exactly the reason low-tech is the way to go. Thanks for the link.

With high tech, you can (and should) have error correction. With low tech someone could easily misread handwriting.

I believe low tech is preferable, but I don't think this is the reason, unless I'm misunderstanding something.

I’d argue we want to make the process easier.

The internal handling of votes should be harden as you explain, but helping more people to vote should be the goal. The reverse is also an attack on democracy, and we already see this at so many scales.

Like setting voting stations at places easier to access for a specific portion of the population (right next to churches on sundays, next to police stations, hard to reach by public transport places, etc.). Reliable online voting would alleviate these kind of issues.

Not saying it’s easy, but we should at least try.

Totally agree. I’ve voted in every election since I’m 18. So far all voting booths have been in walking distance. IIRC all have been on a Sunday, so it doesn’t conflict with work for most people.

If you want more people to vote, then just pass a law that mandates all citizens have to vote.

That's how it is done in Belgium.

Think of it. If your choice is ether vote or risk a fine, you'd rather go and vote. If you go and vote, you'll learn at least a bit about the choices you have to make in the ballot.

P.S. While Belgium got mandatory voting right, it completely messed up electronic voting. I remember being an assessor in a polling station with electronic voting.

People voted, then the head of the voting station took 3 1⁄2-inch floppy disks out of the machine, put them in an envelope and drove away to the district polling committee. There was not counting, no protocol to sign. Nothing. I was appalled.

> If your choice is ether vote or risk a fine

This is ABSOLUTELY not what I want. I for one want voting to be extremely accessible. Everyone that wants to vote can. The goal isn't to make everyone vote but rather that everyone has the ability to vote. That you don't have to take time off to vote. That it is easy.

Universally accessible, not universally mandated.

What happens though is that once you make voting compulsory, you have to make voting as easy as possible.

You could simply mandate that voting be done on a federal holiday. That won't help everyone, but it will help most people who are trying to vote physically.

Australia, which has mandatory voting, also mandates that voting is on a weekend.

Same for Belgium. Voting is always on Sunday.

What's wrong with mandated voting?

People who has no business voting voting. Imagine how many people would vote - not from the informed voter perspective. They'll most likely vote for the candidate they remember in a positive light. Imagine how much more sway would a big ad campaign have. I would be ok if a blank ballot would be the least effort option with no strings attached, but with a "wasting your vote" being a stigma and a part of the culture I see no need in any mandate. I just really don't want people who can't be bothered to go to a polling station on a holiday specifically made for voting to caste their vote to vote at all. Some times gatekeeping certain things is ok. There must be a balance.

Apart from literal children (and felons in the US, I suppose), there is no such thing as a citizen who "has no business voting".

That's the pesky thing about democracy, you see. If you want "informed voters" then you actually have to work to have an informed populace, not gripe about people's right to participate in the society they're a part of.

There’s no such thing as an informed populous. There never has been, and never will be. There was never a “golden age” of democracy, where everyone dutifully read their newspaper every morning that was filled with articles written by unbiased and objective journalists. It’s always been a shit show. Having some reasonable and well understood requirements for who does get to vote within a jurisdiction is a means to ensure that those who do are doing so with care. Perhaps that’s naive. But it’s no more naive than thinking “democracy”, broadly defined, would improve if we had 100% voter participation.

I know it seems utterly incomprehensible to Americans right now, but it actually is entirely possible to have a populace that is at large capable of participating in government with quite a bit more critical thinking than the bipartisan shitshow you currently have going on. Not having shitty education (especially when it comes to social issues) or a culture that's proud of its political ignorance/apathy would probably help.

Not everybody has to be your idea of an intellectual to be a part of a democracy. And not only is that okay, it's precisely the point of it being a "democracy".

> If you want "informed voters" then you actually have to work to have an informed populace

Yes, and the solution to this is not mandating that they vote. If they are uninformed forcing them to vote doesn't cause them to be informed. It makes the system more vulnerable to populism.

Mandating resolves gerrymandering, voting on workdays and a host of other problems.

How? And can't you do that without mandating voting?

There is no griping about the right to participate on my part. I don't think it's fair for you to substitute a mandated voting for a right to vote like this to misrepresent my point entirely. A right is something you have to exercise yourself, any right is an option. When you force everyone to go to the polls it's different, because people who would've never chosen to exercise their voting rights otherwise end up checking boxes, and I don't want that. It's just like you have a right to be a candidate, but you also have to go and gather signatures to actually put yourself on a ballot - where I live we already have 3-4 pages of ballot in every local election. You can't let everyone just sign their name into the ballot without any filters. Same should be true for voters - people who wouldn't bother going to polling stations don't have any business voting by their own admission. You can force people to go to the polls, but you can't force them to care or to put even one thought into that said vote. Now if you want to talk about polling being accessible and more convenient to those willing to cast their votes - I'm all for it. More station? Sure. Disability assistance? Sure! Where I live we do polling at schools, because these are what kids go every day to, and they are located in places everybody knows about and they distributed very sanely and fairly.

Because it is weird to force people to do things that they don't want to if it doesn't harm another person. In this instance, forcing a vote can actually harm others if someone votes randomly.

The idea behind freedom is not absolute freedom. It is a balance of the contract with society vs individual freedom. You want to maximize individual freedom, but for everyone (not a singular person). Clearly things like the "freedom" to murder someone doesn't outweigh that person's individual freedom to live and thus we make laws (and ways to enforce them). Mandating voting decreases individual freedom and has a potential for reduced societal freedom (while little to no real potential for increase. Much prone to populist candidates). So why mandate? Don't solve problems that aren't problems. If someone doesn't want to vote, how does that harm you?

As an Australian, I would argue nothing. I think it protects us from the extremes in political opinions that we see in the US and I hate for us to lose it.

If you go by the American-style "absolute freedom" mantra, I get where you're coming from.

On the other hand, casting a vote doesn't mean CHOOSING a candidate. It means that you can cast a BLANK vote. And that, in and of itself is an extremely important thing. It shows that you are NOT okay with either candidates, and forces them to actually adjust their agendas to suit the "public will", instead of falling back to what I believe is commonly called in the US as "ratfucking", aggressive districting, and voter disenfranchisement, which means they literally only care about getting enough voters to pass.

As for the doability, it's already done in Australia. Pretty successful, and basically and national holiday celebrated like 4th of july in the US.

The problem you are presenting is about protest voting and VSE. There are much better ways to address that problem, such as cardinal styles of voting like Approval and STAR. These also have other properties that help. I am perfectly okay with a "none of the above" option available as well.

If you dont mandate it, then people can be subtly disenfranchised and then blamed for it.

Yep, and let people vote for a longer period of time. Having a voting week or month instead of a day.

Nope, spanning voting over several days makes it easy to hack the electoral process. In Belarus, they voted for 5 days and people are out in the streets for 5 weeks to reclaim their votes. Today is the last of three voting days in Rissia, and it looks like the results will be totally made up.

You can do it without the security issues of online though.

For example every election in Washington ballots are mailed out to every address on file, it’s very easy to print a ballot online if you didn’t get it in the mail, and until recently there have been no supposed issues with mailing ballots (postage is prepaid), plus there are dedicated dropoff boxes as well. And even with all that convenience turnout was 65% in 2016, though it is expected to be higher this year.

Reliable online voting is not hard, it's impossible. There is fundamentally no way that 99.99% of the population could be convinced that any online voting scheme is secure (this includes the vast majority of software engineers). And if voting and vote counting are not understandable to essentially everyone, then you're not living in a democracy.

Are 99.99% convinced that normal voting is secure?

Yes. And even for those few that are not, the representatives they voted for are, whether they won or lost, so it's all moot anyway (either the representative is correct, or the representative is playing their opponent's game, so it doesn't really matter who won).

In general, people don't trust elections because they don't trust their representatives to actually represent their interests, or they don't trust the rest of the political system to actually allow any meaningful change. These are very valid and correct criticisms, confirmed by many sociological studies (in the US at least, the opinions of the bottom 50% of the electorate by wealth have almost no influence on their representatives' agendas).

Voter suppression and vote buying/bullying are much more common, but those have little to do with the voting system (though India has an interesting and complex voting system designed to combat a history of systematic retaliation against entire groups of voters, such as de-funding entire regions that had voted the with the losing party).

But actual voter fraud is rare in most democracies. It's extremely common in authoritarian regimes that are mascarading as democracies, but an online system would make those cases especially trivial.

Adding screens and tech does not help people to vote, and does make untraceable hacking and distortion much easier. The fact that actual states like Georgia have apparently covered up real examples makes this part crucial.

Reliable on-line secret ballots do not exist for us yet and may never.

More easy-to-access polling stations does.

> does make untraceable hacking and distortion much easier

IME, high tech voting makes changing one vote a little harder, but it makes changing the outcome much easier.

Couldn't largely distributed digital systems also be designed? I think we should all sit down and define what the requirements of a secure vote are, regardless of taken in person or otherwise.

I see nothing inherently secure about physical paper as the voting medium. Whatever is written on that paper or how it's handled better also be provably secure somehow.

Paper is provably secure as long as every step happens in public (which also means no voting by mail).

Indeed. That is why I oppose mail in voting. It’s going to lead to civil unrest no matter who wins in November.

My state has been voting by mail for over thirty years with no problems. Absentee ballots are not new.

This FUD will be what leads to unrest, please stop spreading it.

We will likely have civil unrest. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s someone with access to much better data than me: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/09/04/faceboo...

Putting your head in the sand won’t make it go away. Mail-in is a bad fucking idea. Trump suggested a way for his supporters to make sure their vote was counted and Twitter took the tweets down as “election manipulation”. Umm, what? So do mail-in ballots allow double voting or not? Twitter has also said they will remove any Tweets by trump if he claims victory “too early”. So that’s where we are now, huh? If Democrats were so damn confident they could win fair and square, why introduce this wild card?

Changing to mail-in at the 13th hour is not the same as continuing a 30-year tradition. Besides, as others have pointed out, it has led to nakedly corrupt elections in other states (Washington state in 2004). Whenever you introduce the possibility of people being able to ballot harvest or “lose ballots” and those same people are taught that they are stopping literally Hitler it’s no surprise they do what they do. This whole last-minute rush for mail-in ballots stinks to high heaven and even if you think your side will benefit from it, we all lose when trust in our democracy is undermined.

So no, I won’t just kindly shut up and let Democrats steal the election. Or Republicans for that matter. We should all be observing the ballot counting process but this god damn mail-in process means we can’t audit the process. That should scare you. If it doesn’t, you are way too naive.

Taking this seriously (which might be a bad idea), what level of mail in voting do you oppose? Are you 100% against it? What happens if someone will be out of their town/state/country for a few weeks around the election? Should they be able to vote by mail? What about students who are registered to vote at their parents address but live elsewhere? How about people who are sick and cannot safely make it to a polling station?

How many of these sorts of cases are you OK with? Less than 1% of the total votes? 10%? 50%?

I’m ok with absentee ballots, as long as they arrive before Election Day. I’m not ok with unsolicited mail-in ballots trickling in after Election Day which is what we are going to get. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/09/04/faceboo...

Hell, just look at the article. It acknowledges the high costs of mail-in voting. Then engages in classic double-think to defend it:

>“Trump has repeatedly baselessly claimed mail-in voting will lead to a “rigged” election—despite mail-in voter fraud being extremely rare—and decried the fact that the vote could take longer to count, saying the nation “must know election results on the night of the election.” >Facebook blocked videos of Trump encouraging North Carolina voters to vote twice—which election officials warned would be a felony—Thursday, but has not taken action on the president’s Facebook post making similar comments.“

Well which is it? Does mail-in lead to fraud or not? Trump’s allegations are apparently “baseless” but at the same time he got muzzled when he suggested his voters make sure their vote was counted. This is a fucking circus.

"muzzled" ... the president of the united states of america was "muzzled" because FB blocked videos of him? are you serious?

I fill out my paper ballot in my kitchen then put it in a tamper evident envelope and stick it in my mailbox or personally drop it off at a designated location where any member of the public can watch.

The ballot has a removable serial number on it which is detached before returning the envelope. I can use this to look up the status of my ballot online and see that it was counted.

What part of this process is not secure?

The part where envelopes are mailed out en masse and are therefore trivial for fraudsters to obtain[0], and the complementary part where the envelopes are not properly delivered and are just dumped somewhere[1].

[0] https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-vot... [1] https://newjerseyglobe.com/local/postal-service-finds-some-p...

If I don't receive my ballot I can simply request a new one which invalidates the old envelope and ballot.

That only stops fraud if everyone knows how to and takes the time to do it. What about the tens of thousands of dead people still registered to vote[0]? How do they request a new envelope?

Do you have any answers for my 3 sourced statements other than naked assertions?

[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/more-than-20-000-dea...

California has ~39,500,000 residents. 23,000 is 0.058% of the population.

Unless it's right before the election. Or maybe your ballot left your house and didn't make it back to the counting location. These aren't theoretical concerns, they're happening today [1][2][3]. And we see in some cases, there is a political bias pattern involved in election-related mail getting "lost"[4]. People affiliated with both parties have been involved in wrongdoing.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/three-tubs-of-ballot...

[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil...!

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/us/politics/wisconsin-ele...

[4] https://noqreport.com/2020/06/28/caught-on-camera-postal-wor...

In WA ballots are mailed out to voters a month before the election, giving plenty of time to request a new one. If a voter doesn't mail it in time there are in-person drop off spots (basically big dedicated mailboxes) all over town leading up to and on election day.

I was a voter in Washington during the 2004 Gregoire/Rossi gubernatorial election campaign, and what happened during the recounts[1] has proven to me that mail-in balloting is fundamentally flawed and should be banned.

For those unfamiliar with the story, in the 2004 election for governor of Washington, the Republican candidate (Dino Rossi) won the initial count by a very narrow margin (261 votes), triggering a legally-mandated recount. The recount closed the gap to Rossi only winning by 42 votes. A manual recount was performed, and during the manual recount election workers "found" a bunch of ballots; in arguments before the left-leaning state supreme court, the court rejected requests for applying the same recount methodologies in all counties (in opposition to Washington state law) and the "found" votes, mostly from D-leaning counties, put Gregoire into the lead. The Democrats in the state then successfully argued in court against any further recounts, and Rossi conceded without taking his complaint to the state supreme court. Gregoire took office shortly thereafter.

I don't know who should have won that election, but to an outsider it sure LOOKED like some fraud was occurring, especially since the "found" ballots didn't match the statistical distribution of the rest of the votes in the counties, and leaned D significantly more heavily than the counties' original ballots.

So THAT is why I oppose mail in voting. Mail in ballots introduce custody, integrity and identity issues, as well as enable vote-buying and selective vote harvesting, and so are amenable to fraud. We have seen all of these things happen; they aren't theoretical.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...

Thanks for sharing this. It was well before my time in WA.

I'm not sure how this relates to mail in voting though? If there was fraud and D ballots were being hidden where was that happening? Wouldn't it be during counting, not transportation? Would voting in person have changed this or made it impossible?

Oh, my bad, I didn't tie things together.

The found ballots were absentee ballots, which were the only form of mail-in balloting available at the time.

Thanks, I'll have to do some more research on how those absentee ballots differ from the current system. Do you recall if there were changes to mail in voting based on this election?

  A manual recount was performed, and during the manual recount election workers "found" a bunch of ballots

This is exactly what happened with the Santa Clara County (CA, USA) transit tax a few years ago. It initially failed by several hundred votes (2/3 majority was needed). Over the next few weeks, they kept "finding" additional ballots, and every batch had disproportionately high Yes vote percentages on the measure (although all other races were unaffected). Then the second they reached the needed threshold, they conveniently stopped finding ballots.

It's possible for you to easily and reliably prove to a third party how you voted, by doing these things not in your kitchen but in a place and time of their choosing with them watching you put the vote in a tamper resistant envelope that they can collect and put in a mailbox. This enables buying or coercing votes, which has been a big issue historically. Ballot secrecy is a must-have feature - it's appropriate to risk it if (and only if) it's necessary to enable voting at all - e.g. the current practice in many countries, where you can vote in absentia if it's not possible for you to vote 'properly', but it's an exception forming a relatively tiny proportion of votes.

A goal there is to have absolute plausible deniability - that even if you absolutely wanted to show to someone that you voted for A, then we need to ensure that you could do that show even while actually voting for B. If you want to fill out a paper ballot and put it in a tamper evident envelope, then it's important to ensure that nobody can watch (current solutions include in-person voting, and for people who physically can't come, my local elections include an election committee visiting these pre-arranged houses and collecting ballots while ensuring secrecy, i.e. that it can't be filled by a family member). If you want to take a picture of a filled ballot, then we need to ensure that either you can very easily take a picture of a ballot filled differently than you actually voted, or that you can't take such a picture. In systems where you have multiple ballot sheets (e.g. one for each party) and put the one you choose in the ballot box, and the others (for whom you didn't vote) stay outside, then you need to ensure that either everyone can easily and anonymously leave with a set of ballots as if they voted for someone else, or either noone can leave with these ballots.

This is a problem with digital voting. For example, there are various schemes of digital voting you can verify that your vote was counted properly while still remaining anonymous without your cooperation. But it needs to ensure that the vote remains anonymous even if your cooperation can be forced or bought.

Right but you forgot the escape hatch, that you can vote in-person on Election Day to override your mail-in ballot. This gives you the ability to vote for B while appearing to vote for A.

Correct me if I'm misunderstanding, but at least in California this doesn't seem to be the case: https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-resources/voting-cal...

It says you should bring in your mail-in ballot to the polling place, and if you don't then you can cast a provisional ballot "which will be counted after your county elections official has confirmed you are registered to vote in that county and did not vote more than once in that election." Based on that wording it sounds like if you already submitted a vote-by-mail ballot, then you would have already voted and your provisional ballot won't be counted.

> This gives you the ability to vote for B while appearing to vote for A.

Sure, as long as you're fine with whatever retribution the guy you sold your vote to chooses to take.

You're right. Someone who can afford buying votes can also afford people to watch the polling stations and report those who try to correct their vote.

Isn't this a problem with all voting? Even if you do it in a secluded booth, you could just take a picture with a discrete camera.

You could fill out the ballot as you were instructed, take a picture, and ask for a new one which you actually cast. We could even give everyone two ballots by default since asking for a replacement would be suspicious.

Even before cameras, you could go in with a pre-filled ballot and go out with a blank one. All someone needed to verify paid votes was one ballot per polling station (or 2 if voters get 2 ballots).

The part where your reverend demands that everyone who wants to maintain good standing will bring their envelopes with them to church where they will be filled out, sealed, and mailed together. Failure to do this will lead to expulsion, and family shunning.

Or even the part where I offer $10 per ballot.

Expulsion and shunning would make the Rev seem mean. But you're exactly right, just that it will happen under the guise of a free Sunday BBQ feast. Got to bring your ballot if you want to eat though!

How are the serial numbers allocated? If I can predict the serial numbers used over a swath of land, I can replace a large number of ballots dropped in its boxes with my own that have the same serial number. Those I can't predict, I just deliver as-is.

Probably need the equivalent of poll watchers to pick them up from the drop box and deliver to the monitored counting center. I'll believe the tamper-evident nature of the envelopes when I understand the solvent or process required to remove the adhesive without tearing the cover.

The drop box pickup has poll watchers.

The serial numbers are also tied to my address and name so you'd have to both decode the system used for generating the numbers and know the number the state assigned to me.

Do you know the system that encodes your name and address into the serial number? I hope it's a strong one-way hash in order to preserve your anonymity. I also hope it's valid, and not easily identified as one to discard in favor of the right one. Since the state generates the serial number encoded from your personal deets, it's not anonymous until the vote has been separated from the envelope without any association of its contents to your serial number. If there's any such association, your vote is no longer anonymous.

And a root of trust here is state IT systems. In addition to state actors (the nation-state type), we have the classic insider threats driven by both elected and career officials. Need to assume a higher level of competence at least than election commissions have deserved in the past.

The poll watchers are interesting. Do they watch each box from the time it's placed on the curb until the time its contents are entered into the counting system? (What's the overnight security like on them?, what's the transit security?)

Yes I sound like I'm trying to find problems...

So tamper evident mail was never opened before?

https://archive.is/jx8Ey

Edit: fixed URL

> Spanish officials have violated the most sacred rule of international relations by opening a British diplomatic bag at the border with Gibraltar.

Huh?

I stopped reading after the first sentence but did a quick search. The words "tamper" and "mail" don't appear in the article.

> Couldn't largely distributed digital systems also be designed?

Probably, but it would probably be so complex that only a small subset of the population is able to understand how it works. For a vote that’s accepted by the general population you want a process that’s as simple as possible. Everyone understands how paper works.

> Whatever is written on that paper or how it's handled better also be provably secure somehow.

Here that’s largely solved by having lots of volunteers that do the counting. It should be pretty hard to compromise that.

I'm not super convinced that the public really demands to understand the whole system, as long as it's perceived to 'work' and isn't confusing in itself. As others have pointed out, we all use myriad important systems that we hardly understand.

The volunteers bit and generally very human process of counting votes actually seems like a huge attack surface for anyone to 'miscount' votes they don't like. Theoretically everyone's work can be double checked, but does this actually happen outside a recount? It's a huge amount of work in the first place, I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't the resources for it.

What I'll give in-person voting is the human autonomy bit. In principle someone is physically looking at me and my ID, and I go into the booth alone. Even mail-in doesn't accomplish this one.

Bring back the Pony Express! Watch the Russians interfere with that!

Agreed. Though I'd add that a digital copy from a standard, open system--with receipts--can help as a secondary means to verify ones vote was included.

Do you not also want something that is accessible?

Not sure how that computer related. In Germany all voting places are wheelchair accessible. Additionally for the blind, there’s a Stimmzettelschablonen that allows you to vote in secret. These issues can be solved without computers.

Accessible... to people not able to get to a voting location or postbox.

> In Germany all voting places are wheelchair accessible.

There are accessibility concerns beyond just wheelchairs you know...

> Accessible... to people not able to get to a voting location or postbox.

A person doesn't have to be able to get to a post office themselves to cast an absentee ballot. They just have to be able to fill out the ballot and sign it. Someone else can mail it for them.

> They just have to be able to fill out the ballot and sign it. Someone else can mail it for them.

Right, so they have to be able to reliably receive mail at a location fixed at least a little time in advance, and either send mail or give it to someone to send mail, and then it needs to reliably get to its destination.

Not all of those things are always easy for all people's situations.

As a practical example - see the difficulty that homeless people have voting in many cases.

Voting online as an option would possibly solve them for some people.

Given the risks of online voting, I would rather put time and effort into making sure every voter who needs an absentee ballot can reliably receive one and reliably send it back. That seems like a better goal to shoot for.

In Germany you can request to vote by mail. Additionally you can get instructions on Audio CD, in braille or large fonts. As I said, this can and is all solvable without complex technology.

Would you be surprised if I told you some people struggle to send and receive mail?

In Britain, we deal with this problem partly by allowing proxy voting, where you can expressly authorise someone else to vote (in person) on your behalf. I had to do this once when my wife had an unexpected business trip after the postal vote registration deadline had closed. It's obviously not ideal from a vote privacy point of view, but it does provide a useful solution to some of the corner cases preventing voting in person or by mail.

My local elections have each voting location team do home visits on election day for people who physically can't get to a voting location due to disability, severe ilness, etc - in the last elections it was used by the people home-isolating due to Covid. There aren't that many people like that, it takes some funding and effort to make an exception for them, but it is manageable.

Why are you ok with literally none of that for things that handle credit reports, bank/investment accounts, 401ks?

Where does this antiquated mindset of "omg, I need my votes counted by hand!" but "please transfer $1,000,000 using as many electronics as possible"

I trust SSL more than I trust human counting?...

None of those things have the requirement of anonymity. You can verify those numbers at any time, unlike a vote.

The crucial difference is that with the banking system you only really need people to trust that their accounts are correctly tabulated. For voting you need people to trust that everyone’s votes are tabulated correctly. It’s an entirely different problem

The difference is that its much easier to resolve banking errors than... "election errors"

> Where does this antiquated mindset of "omg, I need my votes counted by hand!"

Because that's a feature. You want something that's simple to understand and cannot be easily tampered with at a larger scale.

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