John Nash received his Nobel Prize for work he did as as a graduate student and post-doc. There were a couple of results he found that comprised his PhD thesis and another paper. He didn't actually work in the finance industry -- they took his work and applied it for their own purposes. So using him as a example of research coming out of the sector is a non sequitur.

The tech's still a bit flaky on the reading side if you have more than just a couple of pieces of information, however. JWZ did some investigating into this late last year and came away disappointed. I'm sure it will slowly improve over time, but it's nowhere near Just Works yet: See his results for more details.

It also doesn't have plausible deniability any longer. A union leader or employer or gangster who has some hold over somebody can force them to prove their vote was cast in the pre-agreed fashion: the person has to show that their session id, name, result and what they claim is their key matches up with the hash. They can't fake the key, since creating a hash collision on demand for a pre-specified hash is still a hard mathematical problem. They have to know the session id, otherwise there's no verifiability even for the voter.

There have been schemes created that allow verifiability along with deniability , but they are complex and expensive (in physical equipment terms) and I don't think I can recall one that allows over-the-internet voting (i.e. not being present at a specially constructed voting machine).