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There are a few issues that make voting different: 1) Large scale elections come around every 2 years. It's hard to test things at scale in the interim. 2) Se

There are a few issues that make voting different: 1) Large scale elections come around every 2 years. It's hard to test things at scale in the interim. 2) Security is good at banks because these are large wealthy companies and their life depends on it. A bank that gets hacked loses money and loses trust, so they pay top dollar for security (I have a friend in the software security space who says that 90%+ of his company's revenue comes from banks). 3) Spacecraft and cars don't need to authenticate who their users are. For voting, this is the critical--and hardest--issue to solve. Banks seem to do a pretty decent job at this, but again, they put a lot of money into it. 4) There's a perception that with more complex voting systems, someone can mess up the results intentionally at a large scale. Yes, with paper ballots this can and does happen, but a large scale conspiracy is pretty hard to pull off. Point 4 is the really the most important one. If people don't trust the election system (regardless of whether their mistrust is well founded), then the whole system falls apart. People trust paper ballots. Let's stick with those.

bradknowles 7y ago
Anyone who has done any security consulting at a bank knows that many of them operate almost exclusively in the "security through obscurity" model. The rest seem to look only at regulations that were written ten or twenty years ago, come up with specific concrete solutions that are required to be blindly applied across the board in all cases, and then are totally incapable of dealing with the situation when trying to make the mandatory 8" floppy drive work with the latest and greatest iPad that doesn't have even a single hard wired connection at all. They have all the money, so they can afford to buy off anyone who would expose their security weaknesses to the world. This emperor definitely has no clothes, and pays people to poke out the eyeballs of anyone who might say differently.

bradknowles 7y ago

Anyone who has done any security consulting at a bank knows that many of them operate almost exclusively in the "security through obscurity" model. The rest seem to look only at regulations that were written ten or twenty years ago, come up with specific concrete solutions that are required to be blindly applied across the board in all cases, and then are totally incapable of dealing with the situation when trying to make the mandatory 8" floppy drive work with the latest and greatest iPad that doesn't have even a single hard wired connection at all. They have all the money, so they can afford to buy off anyone who would expose their security weaknesses to the world. This emperor definitely has no clothes, and pays people to poke out the eyeballs of anyone who might say differently.