Let's imagine that our bank starts recording all its economical transactions in a completely anonymous way and thus not any transaction is referenced to us (nor by our name, nor by any secret code). Let's also imagine we have no idea about our monthly earnings, nor about the telephone bill, the insurance bill, the tax bill and so forth and that all our incomes and outcames are automatically accounted to and from our bank account without any notice to us! Let's suppose we are told by the bank itself how much money we have left only at the end of each year!

It's even difficult to image a situation like this one! It would be a real nightmare since it would prevent us from checking the fairness of the bank and from questioning the settlements of account even if the bank boasts about its honesty and accuracy of procedures and technical means.

I'm sure none of us would like such a situation: better entrust our money to another bank!


And yet with electronic vote we find the same inacceptable situation as with the bank. In fact vote procedures must not memorize anything that can relate the vote to the voter, this we want because we want the vote to be anonymous. But without such records how will it be possible for us to check the fairness of the results?

In order to accept electronic vote is necessary an act of absolute faith in the procedures, in the technical means and in the honesty of people and services who actually owns and manage the computers carrying out the counting (exactely like in the above example of the bank).

And we cannot relay upon the hope that special technologies will be used in the electronic vote: procedures and technical means of the electronic vote are simply those already used in any bank: programs, computers and data tranfer lines.