Requiring a hand delivered check vs wire transfer to buy house has a minimal effect on how many people buy a house.
Plus, the US has elections far more frequently than how frequently an average person buys a house.
I think OP meant "efficient" as in "efficient for the people doing the counting." In this case, efficient is not the same as easy. It's efficient to count a bunch of ballots by having people enter their choices directly into a bunch of counting computers that are networked to a central counting computer.
It's easy to vote by getting a ballot (by mail or in person), marking it, and dropping it into a box. But counting those votes is not efficient, or at least not fast.
I'm with you; I want the latter, not the former.
THat's a very rose-colored view on voting, one that conflicts with amount of recounts and outright election fraud that has taken place just in my lifetime. Not to mention the outright denial of some to candidates to attend or speak at conventions and caucuses or having heir delegates ignored entirely.
Ethereum was recently, and succinctly described to be the following by Udi Wertheimer:
“I think that Ethereum is a convoluted mess and I don’t know what it’s good for but fine; other people like it. Good for them.”
That pretty much sums up my perception, at first it was supposed to be a global computer, which made no sense to me... then it was THE Blockchain upon which smart contracts could be created, entirely ignoring Bitcoin's could do that multi-sig txs or nLock. But would facilaite things like smart-contracts for hotels and car rentals, then that faded into obscurity when they knew it was not practical at all given its limitations. Then when Crypto Kitties fad came on I stopped attending the local meetups entirely as I couldn't take them serious anymore.
I was always the 'Bitcoin maximalist' at those events, and while I was using their meetups as a way to grasp why Ethereum even mattered as I was at IBM's Blockchain division where they were openly pushing for ETH based solutions and using an equally complicated things as Solidity was when they mandated everything be done in Hyperledger Fabric.
Ultimately, I realized it was complexity for complexity's sake driven by people who really don't understand this technology at all, and did so with no real reason to justify it other than it fit with the 'it isn't Bitcoin, its this other thing' narrative. IBM really dropped the ball on their advantage to capitalize on the use of this tech to many of its multinational customers, many who seemed eager to explore the possibilities, as a result of this.
I still have some screen caps from the internal study material from the exams and other internal material on a phone somewhere that just focused on how Bitcoin was nothing more than digital currency for criminals online. And how Ripple and Ethereum were some how immune to that with no real explanation to anyone who actually understood the technology [1].
To this day I'm still baffled how anything but greed explains how Vitalik, a former member of Unsystem, was the guy behind this and the subsequent clusterfuck that is ETH/Classic/DAO whatever it wants to call itself.
I kind of wished it had all been a big prank to transfer funds from stupid investors and Putin who were mesmerized by empty claims and buzzwords to fund Unsystem's loftier goals for privacy on Bitcoin but after the DAO I was pretty convinced it was never going to happen. Crypto Kitties made me realize that even they had no idea what they were really building.
1: https://thexrpdaily.com/2020/01/20/ibm-said-ripple-is-unique...
