The difference is that transactions at banks aren’t anonymous.

If you could only see the bank’s final balance with no insight into how much each person deposited and no cash in the vaults, the bank’s reported balance would be pretty meaningless for audit purposes.

How are votes anonymous? You write your name on the ballots and they have a barcode.

We can know _who_ voted, but not _how_ they voted. These are explicitly kept separate so that you can’t sell your vote or be persecuted for how you voted.

We might know which 10 people put money in a bank, but without transaction amounts, it still doesn’t help with the audit.

If your bank account balance is wrong, you can tell for sure that it's wrong and then explain it to the bank and get it fixed. If your vote was counted wrong, you'd never know. For them to be equivalent, the secret ballot would have to be abolished.

Maybe each ballot could include a one time pad that you keep to verify the vote.

You could verify your own vote but nobody else could.

It could be very simple to use, like a qr code that links to a public api showing the encoded ballot data, and a second qr code that you scan to decrypt it.

Not being able to verify who you voted for is by design, it's an important feature to prevent people from being pressured into/persecuted for voting a certain way, or selling their vote.

If there's no way to verify your specific vote you can just lie about who you voted for.

Hence why you would want to use a one time pad... It would be easy to choose a key that would show any particular vote cast any way you want. Only you would know how to verify your ballot.

It's utterly insane to me that you can't even verify your vote was counted and for which candidate. But a communities of hackers defends the security of voting.

> and for which candidate

That's by design, it's an important feature to prevent people from being pressured into/persecuted for voting a certain way, or selling their vote.

If there's no way to verify your specific vote you can just lie about who you voted for.

People notice when you take money from them directly but seldom take notice when its taken from the community chest.