Our world if so full of computers and electronic devices that it comes natural for us to think they might be used for elections too. After all, isn't voting a mere transaction by which we simply add 1 to the electoral "balance" of our candidate, just the way we add money to someone's bank balance when we use our credit card?

Unfortunately votes and economical data largely differ in the level of the secrecy they require thus we can't use the same techniques to process both. In fact:

• financial data can be kept secret to people not involved with them, but are well known to payers, intermediaries, and payees. Financial data are in someone's name: when we pay by check, bank card or credit card, accounts are generated (receipts, debits, credits, orders) in which our name (or our code number) is specified along with the amount paid. Specifically because economic transactions are in someone's name, they can be verified and checked. Receipts can be given to payers so that they can verify their own account.
• votes must be secret from everybody since democracy requires absolute vote secrecy. Each vote must be known only to his own voter (the payer) and unknown to all the others, particularly to the electoral service (the intermediaries) and candidates (the payees).
  Electors can't be given any "receipt" stating how they voted since:
  • people could be encouraged to sell their own vote because they could demonstrate whom they actually voted for.
  • such a "receipt", whichever media could be made of, could be used as an illicit way to know people's electoral preferences: not only employers could discriminate among employees according to what they voted for, but gangsters could verify if people really voted as ordered!
  We can't permit electors any verification of the vote stored in their behalf for the following reasons:
  • a link between each vote and its elector should be stored somehow somewhere and this is obviously dangerous for vote secrecy.
  • even if we could find a safe way to allow voters to verify the vote stored in their behalf, we couldn't trust their verification since they might be under illicit pressure to confirm or deny such vote, they might have changed their mind, or they might simply wish to mess election up!
  In any case, the verification that a vote has properly been stored doesn't imply it has also properly been counted up.

There is another difference between financial data and votes: the balance of our account depends only on our transactions, while the "balance" of the election (who wins) depends on the votes of millions other people, thus checking and verifying only our vote don't help much. We can say that financial transactions are 1:1 relationships while electoral transactions are 1:N relationships.