Credit cards are...
vulnerable to hacking. Any computer can be hacked, therefore online banking and credit card transactions should not and cannot be done online. End of discussion!
Oops. Billions of them happen successfully, without hacking, every year. But online voting is impossible. What's the difference? Government. Few of us (especially in IT) trust government to pull something like that off without a physical, old-school paper trail to back it up.
Simply answer: a voting token. Private companies (lots of them- in competition with each other) can easily create secure systems which establish voter identity and authenticity for a specific election. The token can be bought at any time before the election, and part of the transaction is the reception by govt. of a secure, encrypted counter-token which will anonymously validate and tabulate the person's vote. On or sometime before election day the voter goes online with the token and uses it to vote. (The token itself is not the vote; it is the wrapper around the vote.) The process could also include an encrypted (think 2D barcode) receipt which could be used later for a recount (just scan it back in and reconnect with it's counter-token).
Want a real life example? Paypal. No doubt they can be hacked, but they haven't been, at least not on any major scale. How do we know? They still exit...
To reverse the challenge: can show-up-with-ID-mark-the-paper voting be hacked? Ahh... 'nuff said.
