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Banking has do be done daily, can reverse bad transactions, and has no requirement to keep the customer’s activity so secret that even the bank doesn’t know wha
by mikeash 8y ago
Banking has do be done daily, can reverse bad transactions, and has no requirement to keep the customer’s activity so secret that even the bank doesn’t know what they’re doing.
Elections, on the other hand, happen once or twice a year, can’t be reversed in the event of fraud, and need to protect the voter’s privacy to such an extent that even giving them, and only them, confirmation of how they voted is considered far too dangerous.
- fooker 8y agoBanking has to be done daily only because we are used to modern banking systems. Banking was not done daily 100 years ago.
- mikeash 8y agoAnd the other major differences I pointed out?
- fooker 8y agoHere you go. > can’t be reversed in the event of fraud Counterexamples from one country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UK_Parliamentary_election_petitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UK_Parliamentary_elect... > need to protect the voter’s privacy And you are convinced that there are no algorithmic solutions? Here is an attempt from a famous computer scientist whose algorithms book most of us have read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreeBallot (This one turned out to be cumbersome to implement because of bad UX, but worked rather well.)
- mikeash 8y agoYou can potentially reverse an entire election and do it again, but you can’t reverse one vote. I’m sure there are solutions. My point isn’t that it’s impossoble, it’s that banking and voting are so different that the existence of solutions for one tells us nothing at all about the other.