I trust the bank because it has zero interest in subverting it’s own security. A government that doesn’t want to be removed from power has both motive and ability to do so. Paper Ballots allow Opposition Parties to count votes, an electronic voting system (wich would require the production of custom hardware in a government–owned facility to be remotely secure) would require the opposition to check for dopant-level chip defects.

The Soviet Union had paper ballots.

You're being facetious and you know it. It wasn't paper ballots that enabled the communists to hold on to power, it's that they didn't have any opposition, and their elections wouldn't be recognized as fair and valid by any modern standard.

Half-facetious. If a government really wants to hold on to power by force, they can do it one way or another - elections end up being theatre in that case anyways.

Except in Soviet Union terrorizing all the opposition parties/majority of voters was long, costly and brutal process. Online voting makes the whole thing cheap, easy, and undetectable.

And they got caught. Everyone knew the elections were rigged. With electronic vote you can get away with the crime and nobody's wiser.

Vote results are always really close to pre-election poll results. You can't really manipulate the results too much unless you somehow prohibit polling.

In online banking the bank knows who you are. In this case that would be the government, this is not and should not be allowed.

If such a system could be made that it somehow was able to verify that you are actually the individual registered to vote, but also anonymous so no-one could possibly trace what you voted for. Then you need to be able to setup a secure and verified connection (but still anonymous) but unlike your bank account, isn't the target of multi-international efforts to subvert democracy to gain political favour. Deciding what compatible devices and technology should be used and to ensure that all of the voting population has access to it is another challenge.

Another thing required is for there to be a presence of the candidates or representatives on behalf of them that can monitor the voting process and call out any foul play, which would require people with the right expertise to examine the system so they know it properly counts the votes. Which means a open-source system is required, but the exact details of how it verifies voters will also be exposed.

And what happens to the votes, are they not stored at all or stored temporarily? How do you do a recount if they are not stored and if they are, how do you make sure that data is destroyed completely once the result has been declared?

These are all questions that nobody seems to have a practical answer to.

> What about absentee ballots? How do you make sure they were mailed by the right person?

You have to sign the outer envelope, which can be verified (and is not anonymous).

> Think about it... anyone can just as easily bring a ton of paper ballots and stuff the box that way.

There are a lot of controls in place that prevent that. Number one, the ballot box is never attended by just one person. Number two, the count of ballots has to match the number of people whose identity were verified and voted, and that verification is done by different people.

To stuff the ballot box, you'd have to buy off every poll worker in that precinct, get the list of everyone who didn't vote, pretend to vote for them, and make sure your ballot counts lined up. Since each precinct only serves a few hundred people at most, you'd at best get to put maybe 300-500 ballots in the box. You'd have to do that at every precinct.

You can cryptographically sign things with your private key on your device also, which is put there when you register to vote. Either way, someone can theoretically forge your signature.

You don’t have to get a list of those who didn’t vote. You just take the pile of punched ballots or whatever and replace them with your pile.

All the matching of counts etc. can be done electronically too.

> You can cryptographically sign things with your private key on your device

Unless your device is compromised.

> Either way, someone can theoretically forge your signature.

They could forge your signature, but to be effective, they need to forge thousands of signatures.

> You don’t have to get a list of those who didn’t vote. You just take the pile of punched ballots or whatever and replace them with your pile.

No, the ballots all have unique numbers and the list of numbers is stored separately. You'd have to buy off all the poll workers to pull that off, and you'd have to reconstruct all the records to match your fake ballots.

> All the matching of counts etc. can be done electronically too.

Sure it can be, but not securely, and security (and integrity) is the number one goal of a voting system. Convenience and speed are secondary.

Let's put it this way -- the State of California only does paper ballots. No voting machines are allowed in the most populous state. Why? Because they engaged many security consultants and couldn't figure out a way to vote electronically that was safer than paper.

It takes over a month to certify a California election, because every ballot is cross checked with the precinct records, they randomly recount various boxes of ballots, they check that the outcomes are in line with the polling data, and they verify every single signature on every absentee envelope.

And how do they verify every single signature on every absentee envelope?

I think that, once you start there, you will see that you can compromise those just as easily as a bunch of random iPhones.

They pull the physical signature card from when you registered and compare them by hand. Then they have a second person do it another room.

I think you're too enamored with technology to see that in this case it isn't being luddites about it that is the problem -- it's that very smart people have tried to solve this for a long time and come up with nothing.

It may be time to admit that the hundreds of security professionals with thousands of years of combined experience may just know more than you about election security.

Banks aren’t anonymous.

Also, banks can react to observed attacks quickly, but changes to voting systems has to go through slow political processes (for good reason).

What does that have to do with anything? Can you elaborate so we can see if your argument holds up?

Voting requires anonymity, so you lose a lot of the security because of that.

For a bank, you have a PIN that is tied to your identity. You may also have a second factor that is tied to your identity. The bank can use this to positively identify that you are the one making the transaction, and tie it back to you.

You can also verify the transactions after the fact because it isn't anonymous. You can log into your account and check to make sure what the bank thinks happened actually happened. And if it didn't happen the way you say, you can contest it.

Also, the risk is actually lower because the bank assumes liability. If a false transaction is made you can protest it and if you prove that it wasn't you who made the transaction, you get your money back. With voting, you can't get your vote back.