In 2023, we considered taking on investment capital and went through all the phases startups take in order to prepare for such a business move. We created a product roadmap documenting the technological advancements we need to make in order to realize our vision of developing open-source end-to-end verifiable blockchain-based voting software for use in political elections worldwide. Then, we cataloged the software products we could release to potential customers along the way and forecasted the resources we would ultimately need to get us to the finish line. From there, we produced a go to market strategy for the initial non-anonymous version of Pollaris, analyzed our business costs associated with providing our B2B SaaS products to our initial set of customers, and established pricing models that would enable us to achieve our target profitability margins.

In short, it was a phenomenal exercise to have gone through.

During this exercise, we learned a tremendous amount about business and what it takes to succeed. More importantly, we learned more about ourselves and what we were willing to go through at this stage of our business in order to be successful. Ultimately, we determined that it wasn’t the right time to take on investment capital so we decided to pass on the opportunity. At this point, we are still booststrapping the business on the road to releasing our MVP.

Over the last year, one of our cofounders and CTO of Follow My Vote, Nathaniel Hourt, has made meaningful progress on our MVP, the initial version of Pollaris, despite a few setbacks. At this point, we are extremely close to reaching a sell-able release of the software and will keep you posted in terms of when we reach this milestone.

During this same time period, I’m happy to report that I have made significant progress in working with my fellow colleagues in the Government Blockchain Association’s (GBA) Voting Working Group to pave the way for the next generation of voting systems to be used in political elections worldwide.

In addition to the work we have completed in the past, such as the thought provoking “Remote Ballot Marking & Return Comparison” and recommendations to improve the Election Assistance Commission’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, we released a Voting Supplement to the GBA’s Blockchain Maturity Model (BMM) which serves as the initial version of our standards documentation for blockchain-based voting solutions.

In 2025, the GBA Voting Working Group’s two main objectives will be to advance the adoption of the GBA’s BMM and to secure grant funding for the members of the group. We also hope to make progress with respect to our standards documentation which will forever be a work in progress.

The reality is that, in order to make change on a global scale, we must first make change at the local level. Therefore, another initiative we’ve established for 2025 is to secure the support of Local Election Officials (LEOs) for the adoption of blockchain-based voting solutions in political elections, as they are the individuals responsible for procuring voting systems technology using government funding. As we begin to secure support from LEOs, we’ll be in a better position to change or enact any laws, as needed, in order to allow for the use of this groundbreaking technology in our elections.

However, to make lasting change in the ways in which we are allowed to cast our vote on Election Day, we are going to need support from the population at large.

With this in mind, I have a favor to ask of you. If you haven’t already done so, please share a link to this post with your professional network, social media connections, friends, and family, allowing them to join us on our journey and fight for the right to securely vote from your own device on Election Day.

The post The State of Follow My Vote -> 2024 Report appeared first on Follow My Vote.

As mentioned in our The State of Follow My Vote -> 2021 Report, I’ve joined the Government Blockchain Association’s (GBA) Voting Working Group, in an effort to work with my colleagues from various voting related organizations to solve some of the toughest challenges currently plaguing the voting industry.

This year, our global voting working group made massive strides, developing a thought provoking “Remote Ballot Marking & Return Comparison,” which compared the functional and security considerations of available remote ballot return methods. The takeaway here is that, although the technological community at large has yet to develop truly secure end-to-end verifiable voting software for use in elections, the existing methods that are currently in place are even less secure.

Knowing that the voting industry is clearly behind in this regard, the GBA Voting Working Group is taking a leadership role in advising other organizations that develop voting system certification standards, such as the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), on how best to update their standards documentation.

With respect to the EAC in particular, our voting working group recently submitted recommendations to modernize what they refer to as Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG), as the current and past versions of VVSG do not support the use of internet connected devices.

In theory, should the EAC approve these recommendations, it would make it possible to provide citizens, such as military serving abroad or people with disabilities that can’t make it to the polls on Election Day, a more secure means of remotely casting their vote than they currently have today. We’re excited that these recommendations are currently slated to be reviewed by the EAC’s Technical Working Group.

At present, the GBA Voting Working Group is developing a set of next-generation election standards for each phase of the voting lifecycle (before the polls open, while the polls are open, and after the polls close). We encourage anyone who might have an interest in this initiative to get involved!

With respect to our software development efforts, while I’ve been paving the way for secure open-source end-to-end verifiable voting software to be approved for use in political elections worldwide, our CTO, Nathaniel Hourt has been burning the candle at both ends working to bring our minimum viable product (MVP) to fruition and he’s made some significant progress.

We’re extremely excited to announce that we now have the ability to create decentralized polling/voting software (or any other type of decentralized application (dApp)) in a way in which the implementation of the smart contract can be deployed to multiple blockchains without code changes. This will give users of our software the freedom of choice in terms of which blockchain(s) they’d like to store data on. To our knowledge, this a feat that no other organization in the world has been capable of doing. Nathaniel has named this innovation the Blockchain Abstraction Layer (BAL), which I think is pretty clever/fitting.

We’re also in the process of revitalizing our server infrastructure to ensure it will be ready and able to sustain our MVP upon its release.

In the coming weeks/months, as we work to put the finishing touches on our backend code and get a usable front-end in place, we’ll be sure to give you a sneak peek of our software in action, prior to releasing our MVP and announcing we’re open for business, so stay tuned!

The post The State of Follow My Vote -> 2022 Report appeared first on Follow My Vote.

We encourage our fans and supporters to watch and share the video!

At one point in the podcast, Chris asks about the obstacles we face when considering the trust of users and security of the platform. Follow My Vote CTO, Nathaniel Hourt, gives a thorough explanation of the 3 main concerns we are addressing on this front. Be sure to watch the interview all the way through so you don’t miss it!

You can see other videos in the series on the ChrispBTC YouTube Channel. ChrispBTC plans to interview other companies concentrating on blockchain voting and he is even inviting politicians (for and against) to be on the show.

The Follow My Vote team is open to participating on other podcasts and interview opportunities. If you run a podcast and would like to have us on or have a suggestion for a show that you think would be a good fit, please reach out through our contact form.

The post Answering The Tough Questions On A New Blockchain Voting Podcast Interview appeared first on Follow My Vote.

As discussed in this report, my fellow Follow My Vote Co-founders, Nathaniel Hourt and Will Long, and I knew exactly what we needed to do next… procure grant funding for a decentralized application (dApp) development platform, which we had determined was a prerequisite to developing our secure online voting/polling software!

With this in mind, we put our heads together, developed an impressive grant application, and submitted a Project Pitch to the National Science Foundation’s America’s Seed Fund. As a result, we were invited to submit a full proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF)! However, the story doesn’t end there.

When shopping around for letters of intent the NSF required to submit the full proposal, another organization took a specific interest in our project and offered to provide us with an initial grant budget. We accepted!

That organization is PeerPlays!

PeerPlays is on a mission to humanize the crypto experience, making them a perfect fit for a collaboration with Follow My Vote. We see a paradigm shift on the horizon. With this dApp platform we are developing, we are essentially rebuilding the internet in ways that will change the way in which people communicate/interact with each other in the future. The software applications we use today will function in ways you can’t even imagine.

Now that we have received grant funding, our dApp platform development project is well underway!

It should be understood that the development of this dApp platform is no small undertaking and will likely be a project that spans across multiple years to complete, but rest assured, it will be worth the wait. We also want the world to know that this platform isn’t meant to be ours to own, rather a platform owned by the tech community at large. We’ll get it started, but the goal is to get everyone who’s interested in on the fun!

On that note, if you’re a developer interested in getting involved, be sure to Contact Us!

Over the last year, we also decided to abandon the pursuit of patenting our designs for a secure end-to-end verifiable blockchain-based voting system and method. In our heart of hearts, we decided that these designs were too important to keep to ourselves and released this intellectual property as gift to humanity.

With this move, we were really hoping to spark a new era of innovation in the voting space and foster collaboration between the technology vendors that exist, while encouraging a new wave of potential competitors to enter the voting arena and work toward building secure online voting solutions with true integrity. And, we did.

Upon releasing this IP, staying true to our word, we are now actively exploring partnership/collaboration opportunities in an effort to begin working on the political voting side of things in parallel to the dApp platform. In doing so, we hope to bring a secure and verifiable online voting solution to the people sooner rather than later. 

I’m also actively working with the Government Blockchain Association‘s Voting Working Group on developing the latest certification standards documentation for Mobile Voting Systems to be used internationally. We’ve had some passionate debates on our weekly calls, but things seem to be heading in the right direction.

The political voting side of things can be exciting and all, but keep in mind, we’re just trying to get ahead of things as much as possible. We know we must learn to crawl before we can walk.

To clarify, until this dApp platform is ready for prime time dApp development, our ideal voting system must be deferred in favor of smaller applications to test, refine, and prove out the platform. 

To this end, the first application we plan to launch of this kind on the dApp platform is Pollaris. In a recent announcement regarding Pollaris, we shared the following:

“Named after Polaris, the star which has guided navigators throughout ages past, this initial application will serve as our guiding light. Pollaris will help us to ensure that the platform we build adequately addresses the difficulties of developing blockchain-based applications while enabling us to test our design principles and guidelines to ensure that our solutions are indeed intuitive to people of all walks of life.

In practical terms, Pollaris is a simple polling application intended for use in communities to establish consensus on any issue they may face. The app will be used by administrators to gain insight into member sentiments on the issues at hand, enabling faithful management of the community’s resources in accordance with member preferences. Initial target markets for the app will include Homeowner’s Associations (HOAs) and collegiate student government organizations.”

If you’d like to get involved in the Pollaris project, our Co-Founder and CTO, Nathaniel Hourt, has designed a fun and unique DevChallenge to put your skills to the test. You can learn more here, while keeping in mind that you don’t actually need coding skills to compete. Although experience in app development will be helpful, a motivated individual with no prior development experience could reasonably complete this challenge.

In closing, it’s been an extremely exciting year for Follow My Vote. We’ve come a long way since this same time last year, but the journey continues. So, stay tuned!

NOTE: If you haven’t already done so, be sure to signup for our newsletter and follow us on social media.

The post The State of Follow My Vote -> 2021 Report appeared first on Follow My Vote.

I also explained that until such a foundation is mature, our ideal voting system would be deferred in favor of smaller applications to test, refine, and prove out the platform.

Today, I would like to announce the first such application: Pollaris. Named after Polaris, the star which has guided navigators throughout ages past, this initial application will serve as our guiding light. Pollaris will help us to ensure that the platform we build adequately addresses the difficulties of developing blockchain-based applications while enabling us to test our design principles and guidelines to ensure that our solutions are indeed intuitive to people of all walks of life.

In practical terms, Pollaris is a simple polling application intended for use in communities to establish consensus on any issue they may face. The app will be used by administrators to gain insight into member sentiments on the issues at hand, enabling faithful management of the community’s resources in accordance with member preferences. Initial target markets for the app will include Homeowner’s Associations (HOAs) and collegiate student government organizations.

Pollaris will be developed as a fully open source solution, with rigorous security and transparency standards. The technologies will be open for all to inspect, deploy, and modify as they see fit. Follow My Vote will also offer a fully supported and hosted option for customers who lack either the technical expertise or the desire to manage their own instance.

To ensure that Pollaris is both a commercial success and an effective North Star for our platform, Follow My Vote is pulling out all the stops and challenging all of our assumptions about software design. We are dissatisfied with current standards of software usability and intuitiveness, particularly in blockchain software. Rather than simply point out problems, we aspire to reconsider everything about how software works and lay the groundwork for a new paradigm of human/computer interaction.

Many of the most well-designed and intuitive applications in existence today required armies of developers over sprawling timelines backed by massive budgets, and despite this investment the results leave people frustrated all too often.

Follow My Vote plans to address these issues using a combination of design and technology. First, we will design our software to be self-describing by incorporating detailed information describing the application into the code that comprises it. We will also create systems to allow people to inspect the elements and controls of the application to determine what they do and why they are in a particular status. The application will feature a tutorial mode on first launch showing people how to use the app and how to inspect the components. Finally, we will build a live support system directly into the app to provide human help to users on demand.

Of course, all of these designs require technology to substantiate them and we do not want a one-time solution, but a reusable new approach to developing software. Therefore while we will first build, test, and refine these solutions as part of Pollaris development, they will be generalized into the platform to serve future projects both by our team and others.

While Pollaris is a conceptually simple app, I hope I’ve made clear that there is a great deal of care and attention going into its design and that getting it just right is no small undertaking. Moreover, Pollaris is only the beginning; we have some really exciting ideas to build upon the foundations described above. It will take time to prove all of this out and I can’t say yet how much will make it into the first release, but I do believe when it’s done it will have been well worth the wait.

I’ll be writing more posts as we go forward to announce more about what we’re working on here at Follow My Vote and to go into deeper technical detail on our designs and our ideas, so stay tuned for more. Thank you for reading!

The post Introducing Pollaris appeared first on Follow My Vote.

We’ve come to a point in human history where faith in the democratic process has reached all-time lows, especially here in the United States. At Follow My Vote, we believe there is still hope for humanity in this regard.

Ever since we inked our patent pending designs back in 2014, we’ve had aspirations to bring our designs to life, enabling citizen’s throughout the world to cast their votes with integrity on Election Day. However, taking on such a massive endeavor comes with it’s own set of challenges.

We have learned and accomplished a tremendous amount at Follow My Vote over the years, while trying to bring our vision to life. Throughout this time period, we’ve seen various new voting systems come and go, all claiming to be better than the last. However, when analyzing these systems we’ve detected issues that need to be addressed before being implemented on a mass scale. Despite these issues, some of these solutions are actually gaining traction, which is also concerning to us at Follow My Vote.

We’ve seen widespread infighting in the voting space over the years, mainly between those that are all for adopting modern technology where possible to improve the political process for everyone involved vs those that don’t. We have technology providers developing and testing solutions, while university researchers speak out against their efforts and shine light on the vulnerabilities that exist with these solutions. There has been so much back and forth over the years and a lot of misinformation being thrown around that, as a result, it’s almost as if the majority of people have become convinced that technology cannot save us. We simply disagree.

With this in mind, we are releasing this IP today, as a gift to humanity, in hopes to restart the conversation when it comes to question: “Can ‘We the People’ figure out a way to securely conduct verifiable elections online?”

Let’s be real. If you could vote conveniently from your smartphone on Election Day and be reassured by the world-wide technological community at large that your vote was cast as intended and counted as cast, wouldn’t you? That’s what we are really striving for at Follow My Vote.

From Follow My Vote’s perspective we’ve already designed the voting system that, once developed, will have the upmost integrity in existence. Just keep in mind, it’s going to take us some time to bring it to life.

In the meantime, we encourage you to closely review our patent application as published on Google Patents and get involved in the conversation.

Upon review of our patent application, we’d like to immediately draw your attention to the figures or drawings, Figure 1 and Figure 2.

Figure 1, as shown below, is simply a list of key components that exist within our voting system design.

Figure 2, as shown below, showcases our (once patent-pending / now open-source) anonymous voting key registration protocol, which enables someone to have their identity verified for voter eligibility and subsequently be granted access to their eligible election contests in an anonymous way so that, when they cast their votes, they will be able to literally follow their vote(s) into the blockchain-based ballot box and confirm with their own eyes that their vote was cast as intended and counted as cast.

In short, the above figure is the secret sauce with respect to our invention.

Also keep in mind that this powerful protocol could be leveraged outside of the voting space/use case. Another way to interpret the way in which this protocol works is that, based on the identifying information submitted, this person is authorized to do [fill in the blank] anonymously. So, in other words, it could allow someone to submit an identification submission and have a public key anonymously registered to them, which grants them access to something they otherwise wouldn’t have access to, but we digress.

At this point, we’d like to turn your attention to the patent application’s claim language, as it has changed quite a bit over the years, due to shifting from a system and method patent application filing, to simply a method patent application filing. The updated language also more closely reflects the process outlined in Figure 2 above.

AMENDMENTS TO THE CLAIMS – FINAL

The invention claimed is:

1-29. (Cancelled)

While reviewing the patent application, please also take note of and credit the inventor’s of this paradigm shifting innovation that has the real potential to uplift humanity: Adam Ernest (CEO @ Follow My Vote), Nathaniel Hourt (CTO @ Follow My Vote), and Daniel Larimer (CTO @ Block.one).

As a final note with respect to our patent application’s content, we want to be clear that the way in which we’ve described how public key cryptography is leveraged within our system was intentional, although it is a bit atypical of those that have filed for and received cryptography related patents in the past.

To clarify, we specifically refer to signing transactions with a public key throughout our patent application’s content vs a private key. Here’s an explanation from Follow My Vote’s CTO, Nathan Hourt, as to why:

“With regards to the usage of the phraseology “the XYZ transaction is signed with the Voter Public Key,” and similar expressions within the patent application language, this is admittedly an unusual expression of the concept, and this stems in part from the fact that this particular cryptosystem is atypical among asymmetric (or public-key) cryptosystems, and also in part from the way our patent application endeavors to describe the technical processes in high-level, informative language but does not sacrifice accuracy to do so.

First, it is important to examine the unusual properties of the cryptosystem used in our system (and virtually all blockchain systems), namely ECDSA, and distinguish it from most asymmetric cryptosystems (take RSA as an illustrative example). In both ECDSA and RSA, a signature is generated by plugging the message and the private key into a formula, and out of that formula comes the signature. However, the verification process is quite different: in RSA, verification is done by plugging the public key and the signature into a formula, and out of that formula comes the message; however, in ECDSA (our cryptosystem), verification works by plugging in the message and the signature into a formula, and out of that formula comes the public key. This is a critical distinction: RSA and many other asymmetric cryptosystems cannot determine the signer’s identity from the message and signature, they determine the message from the signature and the signer’s identity, but ECDSA determines the signer’s identity from the message and the signature. In light of this, it begins to come clear how the package of the message and the signature could be described as being “signed with the public key” — the public key didn’t do any signing, but the signing embedded it into the message! The message and signature, by nature of the math, come with the public key — it’s just part of the package.

To clarify this meaning, consider a paper contract with a wet-ink signature. We could say “the contract was signed with a pen,” and this would be technically correct, but not particularly informative. We could also say “the contract was signed with the man’s name,” which is also technically correct, but offers a better description of the information conveyed by the signature. In the same way, the patent application says “the transaction signed with the public key,” it is not implied that the public key is the pen that created the signature, but rather that the public key is the information conveyed by the signature. If the patent application said “the transaction signed with the private key,” this would be similar to saying “the contract signed with the pen,” which is technically accurate, but less informative. In the same way as the pen attaches the contractor’s name to the document, the private key attaches the public key to the transaction. It is more informative, then, to say that the message is signed with the public key because this is the useful and relevant information conveyed by the signing, rather than to say that it was signed with the private key, which is not conveyed by the signature but was merely the tool used to make it.

The patent application attempts to clarify how this phrasing is intended in paragraph 0007 by saying “the public key […] signs the transaction, the private key is [used] to authorize the signing” — the public key is the information borne by the signature, but the private key is necessary to authorize one to attach that information to the transaction. It is important to be clear that the public key is the information borne by the signature, as the voter registration process described in FIG. 2 and paragraph 0019 demonstrates that the public key is what is registered to vote, and therefore a transaction with voting decisions must be signed, as per paragraph 0005, with the voter’s public key in order to be recognized as valid. This works because although the private key is necessary to attach the public key to the transaction, the public key is the only information which, like a contractor’s signed name, can be recognized as endorsing the transaction to have effect.

The intended meaning is that the public key is conveyed with the signature, and due to the mechanics of the cryptography, only one who holds the corresponding private key possesses the tool uniquely capable of conveying that particular public key, therefore the message signed with the public key must have come from one who holds the private key, and because the private key is never transmitted, it is extremely difficult for anyone to have the private key except the one who created it, giving the system and its users confidence that the transaction properly signed with a registered public key has the force and effect of the one who registered that public key, even though their specific identity can no longer be recovered.” – Nathaniel Hourt

What does all this mean for Follow My Vote and the voting industry at large?

Follow My Vote has always intended to publish our software as open-source; and, filing a utility patent application for our intellectual property was a strategic move from a defensive perspective.

After speaking with our patent attorney, we’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve done all that we need to do in order to protect ourselves from being sued from practicing our own invention down the line. With this in mind, and in the spirit of the open-source movement, we feel compelled to put our money where our mouth is and abandon our patent application as it exists today.

Moving forward, anyone that wishes to leverage our ideas in their voting system designs can freely do so; and, we hope they do! In other words, what this really means to those competing in the voting space is that these individuals and organizations can now freely innovate on behalf of “We the People” without the impediment of potentially infringing on Follow My Vote’s would-be IP, so that the best ideas can percolate to the top, be tested, and implemented over time.

With our release of this IP, we’re really hoping to spark a new era of innovation in the voting space and foster collaboration between the technology vendors that exist. We also hope to encourage a new wave of potential competitors to enter the voting arena and work toward building secure online voting solutions with true integrity.

For now, we at Follow My Vote have our hands full, as we work to lay the foundation for the development of a secure open-source end-to-end verifiable blockchain-based voting system. But, rest assured that, once we have the opportunity to bring our designs to life, we pledge that we will not attempt to market our solutions for widespread use until they have been battle tested by the brightest tech minds on the planet.

At the end of the day, the world needs to know it’s not about the money for us. Follow My Vote is about solving this global issue for humanity, once and for all, before moving on to the next biggest issue humanity is facing.

We are here to serve the people, plain and simple, and encourage you to follow us on our journey (and perhaps get involved) in the days ahead.

As always, if you are interested in exploring collaboration and/or partnership opportunities, please contact us using the form below:

The post Follow My Vote Releases Patent-Pending IP As A Gift To Humanity appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Things are looking quite a bit brighter now, though, and we are once again confident in our ability to deliver what we promised. Over the past years, the difficulties we encountered affected each of us who make up Follow My Vote differently, and tested our resolve, but over time, we have been refined by this fire, and it has clarified our vision and strengthened our resolve to continue. We have examined our situation and ascertained our position, charted a course forward, and embarked upon the journey.

Make no mistake, Follow My Vote is fundamentally the same today as it was when last we spoke. We are a small crew of three guys, brought together by a shared vision of a better world, based upon systems that work for everyone, where the best ideas are gathered, tested, refined, implemented, and improved. A world where communication is easier and more effective, where societies are formed by individuals empowered to speak out about the problems they see, propose solutions to those problems, experiment on how to implement those solutions, and collaborate on which implementations are most safe, effective, scalable, economical, and desirable.

Having surpassed the difficulties that beset us, we are as convinced as ever before that this vision can be realized, but we also have greater clarity on just how big that vision is, and how much work it will take to bring it to fruition. We have identified the necessary groundwork and have secured operational funding to begin laying the foundations. We have formulated a plan and are currently working on its execution.

In order to succeed in making our vision a reality, we have realized that we must be more open and transparent about that vision, the plans to realize it, and the path and progress to getting there. Today, we are sharing our vision and plans as they exist now, and we are committing to maintain an open dialogue as to our position and progress at every step along the way. As a first step along this path, in addition to this article, we are also giving to the world our pending patent for one of humanity’s most important solutions for scalable communication: a secure, anonymous, end-to-end verifiable online voting system.

The importance of a new solution for voting is clearer now than ever before. Confidence in election integrity would seem to be at an all time low, and the need is great for more scalable and accessible solutions, without compromising on integrity, security, and privacy. Some solutions are already being proposed and brought to the market, but these solutions are dangerously ill-prepared to meet the needs of modern elections, and we at Follow My Vote are gravely concerned that the market may be swayed by these ineffective half-measures. This makes ever more clear the pressing need for transparency and education on the concerns involved in designing an online voting system to meet the rigorous security and voter privacy requirements necessary to re-establish confidence in election integrity.

At the same time, we are fully aware that voting is only one of humanity’s communication needs. New solutions are necessary to support all kinds of communication with guarantees of integrity, authenticity, and privacy. While the internet has become the de facto solution for our communication problems, the technologies which exist today are inadequate to provide for the next generation of services and applications supporting communication at scale. By creating new internet technologies which adequately support the rigorous requirements of online elections, we simultaneously establish a foundation and platform, not only for voting solutions, but myriad other applications as well.

Since 2014, Follow My Vote has had a plan for an end-to-end verifiable, anonymous online voting system secure enough to support national elections. The difficulty is that the current solutions to problems fundamental to all online applications were simply not intended to withstand the kinds of attacks we expect and observe to be leveled against national elections. We need solutions to these problems the same as everyone else, but whereas the existing approaches may be adequate for other applications, if we relied upon these technologies, our voting system’s security would be decimated and it would be feasible that advanced or well-positioned attackers could successfully interfere with the results.

In the intermediate years, we have struggled to keep the company afloat while searching for solutions that could solve the problems well enough that we could build our system and deploy it with confidence that its foundations were strong enough to deliver on its promise without crumbling under the load of real-world usage and attacks. At the same time, we’ve been confronted by numerous dilemmas where we could compromise the principles informing the design of our solutions to make them more practical or popular, but at the cost of making the resultant system less trustworthy or easier to defeat.

Through these trials, we have come to understand that Follow My Vote’s purpose in the market, the company’s raison d’être, is to make, with absolute and honest purity of intent and principles, an online voting system with absolutely zero compromise on security and voter privacy. We know that honesty and principles are rigidly inflexible, and to hold ourselves to these standards, we will make decisions which will be unpopular and politically incorrect. Nevertheless, we will hold to principle and create a solution with zero compromise in the integrity of its design or its results, wherever that takes us. Our software will be open source and free to modify, and others will be welcome to make dilute versions which they find more palatable, but we will keep our designs on the straight and narrow path of the greatest possible integrity and resilience.

The first step on this path, then, is to share with the public our plans to make such a system logistically and technically feasible. As we have stated above, existing solutions for creating online applications are not adequate to support our online voting system. A secure online voting system must not only give voters incontrovertible proof that their decision was accurately recorded and included in the tally, but it must also be resilient enough that it would be infeasible to prevent voters from successfully casting their votes, and it must ensure that the voter’s privacy is absolute and unbreakable by any entity within the system, while simultaneously guaranteeing that only legitimate voters can successfully cast a vote and that each voter gets exactly one vote. To ensure that all of these constraints are met, a protocol, or the rules and procedures governing how the system works and how information is handled, is established and an application is used by voters to easily and intuitively interact with the system according to protocol. This application is written in software code and that code must be downloaded to the voter’s device or computer to enable them to interact with the system. Once the voter has the application, they use it and it locates and communicates with other computers in the system on their behalf. All of these processes must succeed, and all of the information must be handled with integrity, even under attack, even when the attackers are well funded, technically advanced, and enjoy privileged positions of power from which to corrupt the system.

There are two universal problems to be solved in making any application based on communication technology such as the internet. First is getting the application to the human so they can use it, and second is supporting the application’s communications as it operates on the human’s behalf. Both must be conducted without a reasonable possibility of corruption. The first problem, getting the application to the human, is typically solved today by downloading the application over the web or from an app store. The second problem, supporting the application while it locates and communicates with other computers online, is typically solved today using the Domain Name System (DNS) and Certificate Authorities (CAs). Unfortunately, all of these solutions — web downloads, app stores, DNS, and CAs — are susceptible to easy attack if the attacker is adequately advanced or enjoys a convenient position of power. These solutions were designed only to be secure against common attackers without powerful positions, but a voting system needs to be secure even against attackers who happen to control, or can seize control of, instrumental computers within the system. As a result, these technologies constitute a weak foundation for an online voting system, and any system based upon them, no matter how much security is added later on, is susceptible to attack.

Furthermore, the aforementioned technologies are not highly resilient to outages and failures. If key systems fail, the application may not load, may not function, or may not successfully locate other computers within the system. For highly sensitive applications, this is not adequate. In the immortal words of Apollo 13, “Failure is not an option.” In the face of outages and failures, the technology must automatically recover or choose a new path that does not fail. If the outages are insurmountable, then the human must be given clear and practical guidance on how to proceed successfully. While this kind of redundancy has been achieved with existing internet solutions, it requires enormously expensive and complex systems which require substantial expertise and resources to construct and maintain, and even then, the solutions are centrally managed, meaning that they are resilient to outages, but not to well-positioned attacks. To support an online voting system, simpler strategies for resilience and redundancy must be found, which do not require unusual skill or resources and central management.

To meet these needs, Follow My Vote has examined the technologies available and selected more fundamental technologies which have been around for longer and provide more basic services with few conveniences relied on by modern application developers. These older and less convenient, but more durable technologies remain in widespread use and are still fundamental to our modern systems today, and thus they constitute a strong foundation upon which to build. From this position of strength, new solutions can be implemented which leverage the experience gained from the modern web to provide all of the power and convenience to which modern developers have become accustomed and more, but without relying on less robust or resilient approaches to provide them.

Out of these solutions can be fashioned a new platform for communication applications. This is not just a solution for voting; indeed, if it were then it would be questionable whether the design could be securely maintained and withstand the tests of time. By creating a solution to benefit an entire new generation of online applications, we ensure that, as with the web today, our platform is continuously examined and improved as it supports a vast and growing array of vested interests, including many that are newly made possible by the greater architectural stability of the proposed platform.

Only once this platform is fully established will we continue with building our anonymous, end-to-end verifiable online voting solution. We will construct simpler applications to prove out the platform and demonstrate its proper use, but until the platform is ready, we cannot build a ruggedly secure solution for elections, and we dare not risk redirecting resources away from the foundation prematurely. This will ensure the platform is rugged and stable before we begin building a mission critical solution on top of it, but by building smaller solutions on top of it in the meantime, we use our own designs and ensure that the platform is practical and convenient enough for everyday usage as well.

Although Follow My Vote has had our struggles in the past, we’ve learned many lessons and we’ve gained experience so that now, we have confidence that we can build the system we set out to build years ago. These difficult lessons have shown us just how far we have yet to go, but also how far we have come, and they have given us the resourcefulness we will need to succeed in walking the path we have chosen for ourselves. We know that the work cut out for us is enormous, but we also see that the need for it is as great now as it ever has been, and we are galvanized by the threat that the market may lose hope that a truly secure and integral online voting system is possible and settle for a dangerous half-measure.

Having now fully ascertained our position and regained our footing, we know the magnitude and scope of the work we have yet to do, and it is surely daunting; nevertheless, we believe that the work can be done, and we know that it will be worth it when it is finished.

As we press onward, we know the value of transparency and openness and we commit to be more communicative as to the development of our solutions going forward. We hope that this visibility gives the market hope that true solutions are possible, not only for voting, but for a host of applications targeting critical social and societal issues, and we hope that others will support our efforts to create a solution not only for our own applications, but for everyone’s. We thank you for your attention in reading this article and following our progress as we follow through with all that is within us on the work we have described.

The post Allow Us to (Re)Introduce Ourselves appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Over the past few years we’ve been contacted by media outlets, university researchers, county registrars, political parties, and voters alike wanting to know, “What happened with Follow My Vote?”

In short, we’re still here and we’re not going anywhere.

To elaborate a bit more, we wanted the public to know that, in November 2016, due to lack of funding, Follow My Vote hit the end of our runway, at which point my fellow Follow My Vote Co-founders, Nathan Hourt and Will Long, and I were forced to find day jobs in order to make ends meet.

Since then, we’ve spent our nights and weekends trying to make progress where we can.

Fast forward four years…

We know it’s been awhile since you’ve heard anything from Follow My Vote. But, we’ve been paying attention to what’s going on in the world and we wanted to take this opportunity to reassure the public that we firmly believe that there is still hope for a brighter future, a future where each and every one of our citizens has a voice and our votes truly matter.

We want the world to know that, at Follow My Vote, our mission is to promote truth and freedom by empowering individuals to communicate effectively and implement non-coercive solutions to societal problems AND we see ourselves as citizens of the planet, first and foremost.

It’s also important to note that, at Follow My Vote, we serve the people.

~So, why voting?

Being that we are located in the United States, we’ve decided to start out by focusing on building the solution we think the citizens of the United States need now more than ever, a secure and verifiably honest online voting system, one that provides greater accessibility to the polls on Election Day.

Voting is one of the key pillars to any society with a democratic government.

Therefore, citizens within democratic societies that utilize voting systems and processes that hinder accessibility and ultimately lack verifiability should be concerned. The United States is no exception. It goes without saying that, at Follow My Vote, we see the lack of accessibility / transparency with respect to the voting processes and systems that are currently in place in the United States a cause for grave concern.

In regards to verifiability in particular, with new concepts like those introduced recently by Fiscal Digital in Guatemala, we are seeing new models emerge for applying transparency to the legacy voting processes and systems in place today and applaud those willing to implement these types of solutions, ones that ensure electoral integrity and attempt to restore faith in the voting process.

Now let’s shift the focus of this article toward accessibility for a moment.

~Will Voting Be Handled Differently In The Post Covid-19 Era?

These are troubling times. While the world is still reeling from the coronavirus or Covid-19 outbreak, there is unrest all around us. Things will likely never be the same again, especially when it comes to voting.

Now more than ever, people are standing up and taking action for what they believe in. Citizens are being encouraged to vote as a way to express their opinions on Election Day. But, what happens when “We the People’s” vote is disenfranchised?

If you have been paying attention this primary season, you’re well aware of the debacles taking place at centralized polling locations. Several primary elections have been plagued by issues with the Covid-19 outbreak, such as the massive closing of many centralized polling locations causing ridiculously long-lines at the polling locations that are remaining open, which is effectively disenfranchising voters.

Just the thought of catching Covid-19 at the polls is terrifying, causing people not to show up and vote and rightfully so. United States citizens, or any citizen of any country that hosts elections for that matter, should not have to literally risk their lives in order to vote. Thankfully, some legislative change is happening to address this crisis, as things are only going to get worse as we move closer to the United States 2020 Presidential Election AND there’s no telling if the situation will improve thereafter.

However, at the end of the day, Governors, Secretaries of State, Legislators, Election Officials, academics, cyber security experts and most importantly, the voters will ultimately weigh in and decide if / when the United States is ready for secure end-to-end verifiable mobile voting.

Despite not having every United States citizen onboard the mobile voting train, now more than ever, we firmly believe that the need for a secure and verifiably honest mobile voting system, one that provides greater accessibility to the polls on Election Day, couldn’t be more apparent. So, we’re staying the course.

~Is there really a need to bring voting securely online in the United States?

The shocking reality is that many United States citizens currently cast their ballots via postal mail, email, or fax. Why you ask?

A large subset of these voters are absentee voters, those voters that can’t physically make it to their designated polling locations on Election Day. Many of these voters are also Military Overseas Voters, those fighting for the United States in foreign conflicts around the world. And, as of late, vote-by-mail is simply not an option for these citizens, in particular, as international mailing operations have come to a screeching halt due to Covid-19 issues. This means that United States Military Overseas Voters are currently being forced to use incredibly insecure electronic methods of casting their ballots, electronic voting methods which have been approved for use in many states for years now.

To make matters worse, if you really open your eyes to what’s going on, one can see that the entire United States election infrastructure is falling apart.

We’re living in modern times. Modern times call for modern solutions. Therefore, at FMV, we firmly believe that if there is in fact a way to bring voting securely online, to address issues like these and others, we should.

To be clear, we’re not advocating taking away the right for United States citizens to utilize these currently approved voting methods, which are riddled with known security vulnerabilities through and through, all we are saying is that the citizens of the United States deserve better and we’re on it!

~What do you say to those that criticize mobile voting solutions?

We understand that there has been decades of opposition by certain university researchers and security professionals with respect to bringing voting securely online. Although many critics have made some very valid points about security concerns with respect to mobile voting solutions, the people need to start reading beyond the headlines they come across in the media and the conversation needs to shift from “Why Secure Online Voting Will Never Be Possible!” to “How Could We Make Online Voting Secure?”

This singular issue is much bigger than Follow My Vote. At this point, solving this technical challenge, meaning figuring out exactly how to build a secure end-to-end verifiable mobile voting platform, has become a humanitarian cause worth pursuing. Thus, we are encouraging everyone around the world to get involved in this project.

When it comes to the United States, we are fully aware that some citizens are perfectly comfortable with waiting in line to cast their vote at a centralized polling locations on Election Day or mailing in their paper ballot in ahead of time as a means to cast their vote in an election. However, we are also very aware that there is a certain population of United States citizens that would love the opportunity to vote conveniently / instantly / securely / verifiably from their own device on Election Day AND that population is growing.

We’re building our solutions for the latter group.

Just to be crystal clear here, we’re not trying to change the way anyone currently votes in the United States today. We’d simply like to provide United States citizens an alternative option for voting on Election Day and encourage those that care about electoral integrity to vote with integrity by using more secure and verifiable voting methods.

~When did this all start?

Although I founded Follow My Vote on the 4th of July in 2012, our technological approach to administering an election using blockchain technology (or distributed ledger technology) dates back to 2014.

This ingenious approach was invented during our time spent at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center in Blacksburg, VA. While exploring potential collaboration opportunities with Dan Larimer and the core developers at BitShares, Dan was the first person to introduce blockchain technology (or distributed ledger technology) to me.

Once I learned of this new technology and that it could be leveraged to develop a secure end-to-end verifiable mobile voting system, one that could provide greater accessibility to the polls on Election Day, we decided to make that our core focus at Follow My Vote and haven’t looked back.

From there, myself, Follow My Vote’s CTO (Nathan Hourt), and Dan Larimer began innovating. When we designed our patent-pending technological approach, we threw out all preconceived notions of voting systems design that had come before us, in order to have a fresh set of eyes on the problem.

The greatest challenge we faced was to design a secure voting system that incorporated an identity verification component and was end-to-end verifiable, yet anonymous, all while avoiding the creation of any single points of failure in the process.

The end result was our patent, which was published on Google Patents on 4-20-17. It’s also important to point out that, although I’m listed as one of the Co-inventors in our patent, along with Nathan Hourt and Daniel Larimer (CTO of Block.one), Follow My Vote owns 100% of the intellectual property associated with our patent.

~How does your invention work?

Upon review of Fig. 2 in our patent, you will see our designs for an anonymous voting key registration protocol. You’re eyes probably just glazed over as you read that. But, let’s do some unpacking there.

A protocol is just a process. And, when embedded in our voting software, this protocol allows a voter to have their identity verified, and be issued the proper ballot in an anonymous way, so that when the voter casts their ballot, they can quite literally follow their vote into the ballot box and confirm with their own eyes that their ballot was cast as intended and counted as cast. Furthermore, since all votes remain anonymous within the ballot box, all votes cast within our system during an election can be independently verified by anyone, which is showcased in our user-experience demo below:

When you think about it, this invention is truly revolutionary, as, to our knowledge, a protocol/voting system like this doesn’t exist anywhere in the world, even today.

It’s also important to point out that, when inventing our secure voting system, we decided that it was important to mirror the voting experience that currently takes place at centralized polling locations on Election Day, at least in the United States. But, in order to make the process end-to-end verifiable, we had absolutely no choice but to bring the system online.

Furthermore, when putting our thoughts on paper, our goal was to design the ideal voting system, one that couldn’t be compromised by any single actor involved in the election administration and/or voting processes, to include members of our own organization. We had to assume that if any single actor within the system can be a bad actor, they will. And, if history has shown us anything, it’s that people are fallible and can be compromised.

~What Follow My Vote solutions exist today?

We’ve designed a powerful protocol, but the elections grade voting platform itself has not been built. However, we have completed the beta version of our stake weighted voting software, which was integrated with the BitShares public blockchain back in 2016. This software demonstrated our ability to securely store voting data on a public blockchain. But, this software still lacks an identity verification component and our patent-pending anonymous voting key registration protocol, which are both needed in an end-to-end verifiable elections grade voting platform.

When it comes to developing elections grade software, security is the most pressing issue. Therefore, we felt it was imperative to establish our own security standards with respect to mobile voting system design. After analyzing the landscape for years now, we’ve determined that in order to build truly secure voting software, we’d first need to build a decentralized application platform that meets our security standards AND from there develop a decentralized application (dApp) for administering an election / a mobile voting dApp, which will sit on top of this dApp platform.

Now, building such a system will not be such an easy feat, as the dApp platform/mobile voting dApp is a multi-million dollar project that will likely span 2 to 3 years development time, at least by our current estimates. But we’re up for the challenge. Some people call us crazy. They think what we are striving to accomplish is simply not possible. Many of those same people called Elon Musk crazy when he committed to attempting the impossible by putting a man on Mars with his space exploration company called SpaceX. But, look at SpaceX now. Sure as Elon Musk, we are confident we can get the job done in time and with the proper funding.

~Will you need to raise capital to get the job done?

Follow My Vote is still very much a start up. We have yet to raise capital beyond a $50K friends and family round back in 2016. At this point in time, due to the sanctity of our current project, we are choosing to rely solely on grant funding to keep the business afloat.

To date, the majority of our time, effort, and operating capital has been spent on securing our intellectual property, developing our user experience demo software for our end-to-end verifiable mobile voting system, building our minimum viable product (MVP) for our stake weighted voting system, and educating the public of the vulnerabilities and security concerns that exist with respect to the voting processes and systems that are currently in place in the United States via our website and social media.

Should we receive grant funding in the days ahead, the funds will be appropriated to the development of our dApp platform / mobile voting dApp, which will be open source and available for use by the public.

~Are you aware of your competitors in the voting arena?

We are aware of the current players in the mobile voting space, such as Voatz and Democracy Live. We know of the voting solutions they’ve demonstrated AND we know that they are gaining traction. We have our unbiased opinions (both good and bad), which we will share with the public, in time, via our website and social media channels. But, regardless of what we may think about our competitors and the mobile voting solutions they’ve released to date, we applaud the belief in the ideal of people like West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswald and Utah County Clerk, Amelia Powers Gardner (among others) whom have demonstrated their willingness to trust in modern technology as a means to increase access to polls.

Despite what you may have read in the news lately about those competing in the mobile voting space, at Follow My Vote, our singular motivation is to solve this technical problem for the citizens of the planet, not to make a profit. Everyone should know that Follow My Vote is a non-partisan public benefit corporation, which on one hand means that we have no hidden agendas of any kind AND on the other hand it means that, if we succeed, a portion of our profits will go towards making a positive impact on society far beyond what our software solutions will provide.

As we work to bring our software solutions to life, it’s important to reiterate that we are taking the open-source approach to software development, which means that we plan to share our source code with the world, once it’s completed. This opens up the opportunity for our software to be reviewed and scrutinized by researchers all over the world before our secure end-to-end verifiable mobile voting software is ever used in an election. We may stumble and we may fall along the way, but we plan to pick ourselves up and try again until we get it right.

To be clear, we fully intend to open ourselves up to security reviews and 3rd party assessments from renowned security experts, such as Trail of Bits, at every step of the way and will share these outcomes with the public, as they happen, on our road to our first pilot.

~What challenges do you anticipate on your road to success?

Upon receiving grant funding, and as we work toward developing our decentralized application (dApp) platform and mobile voting dApp, we anticipate having to tackle a whole host of technical challenges, many of which will be heavily focused on security. But, we wanted to take this opportunity to point out that any company taking on the challenge of developing a secure end-to-end verifiable mobile voting platform will eventually have to address the following issues:

• Verifying Identities – Mobile devices aren’t always secure. As we are seeing now, with digital signature matching, digital identity verification can be problematic. One should also keep in mind that there is a myriad of ways digital identity verification can be accomplished, each of which come with their own security challenges/risks. Regardless of the digital identity verification approach that is taken, companies will need to get this first step in the voting process right if they are going to even get the opportunity to work on other parts.

• Getting Ballots to Voters – Digital issuing of ballots will not be easy. Making sure the proper ballot is delivered securely and untampered with to the voter is absolutely critical.

• Maintaining Anonymity – Secret ballots are essential for democracy. Being able to remove identifying connections from digital ballots is an essential step. That being said, WV Secretary of State Mac Warner, was recently attributed in saying it might be necessary to eliminate ballot secrecy for internet voting, in order to ensure that votes are safely transmitted. At Follow My Vote, we wholeheartedly disagree, as we’ve already designed a voting process that will allow for anonymous voting within our mobile voting system. Therefore, it is our position that this perceived voter anonymity issue stems from a lack of creativity in voting system design to date, which is why no other company has accomplished this feat yet, at least to our knowledge.

• Secure Data Storage – When designing secure and verifiable mobile voting software, the incorporation of blockchain technology (or distributed ledger technology) is a must, at least in our opinion. Blockchain technology alone is not a silver bullet in terms of developing a secure mobile voting platform, as the approach comes with it’s own set of challenges. However, by incorporating distributed ledger technology into your mobile voting system you can be assured that votes stored in the ballot box will be stored securely in an irreversible way, meaning the decentralized database that is the blockchain is incapable of being hacked by a would be attacker. This is also one of our areas of expertise at Follow My Vote, so we don’t anticipate too much of an uphill battle there.

• End-to-End Encryption – Facilitating secure communications should be a fundamental requirement within any mobile voting system’s design. If we want to be taken seriously, we’ll need to ensure that we get this done right. Otherwise, our system will not be trusted.

• Fully Auditable Systems – At the end of the day, citizens around the world need to be able to have trust in their own election results. Therefore, we believe that the only way a secure end-to-end verifiable mobile voting system can truly be trusted is if the software is open-source, meaning that the source code is fully auditable. This is perhaps the hardest part for your typical voting system vendor to deal with. However, it’s the easiest point for Follow My Vote to deal with, as we have pledged to be open-sourced and fully auditable from the very beginning AND we remain committed to that end.

~Where do you see opportunities to pilot your secure mobile voting software, once it’s been completed?

Right now, in the United States, many states are currently trying to scale vote-by-mail programs to keep people safe while they vote, which means that many voters will, for the first time, not vote on Election Day 2020 at a centralized polling place. We know vote-by-mail is not perfect AND many of the risk points mirror the risk points of mobile voting, such as getting ballots to voters, ensuring voter identity while protecting anonymity, protecting the ballots, and producing accurate, auditable results. But that’s where we think the majority of opportunities for a pilot will come from, meaning anywhere we see vote-by-mail taking place today, we are expecting to see secure mobile voting eventually being an option. You could say the same about anywhere where absentee voting is currently taking place, and in particular for Military Overseas Voters.

It goes without saying that, at Follow My Vote, we hope to learn a great deal during this election, and move closer to the goal of safe, secure end-to-end verifiable mobile voting.

~Any parting words?

We know we have a long and winding road ahead of us. But, as we stated in the very beginning of this article, we wanted the world to know that we’re still here and we’re not going anywhere.

We also wanted the world to know that we are open to partnerships and collaboration opportunities where it makes sense. So, whether you are a voting related organization, a potential user of our mobile voting software, or a single individual with dreams of making a difference, if you are interested in working with us in any capacity, please don’t hesitate to Contact Us using the form below.

In closing, even if we have to tackle this problem on our own, Follow My Vote is up for this challenge AND we invite you to take this journey with us! So, be sure to signup for our newsletter and follow us on social media!!

The post The State of Follow My Vote -> 2020 Report appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Bitcoin Magazine, which has featured Follow My Vote before, is actually a contributor on Nasdaq.com and is responsible for the article entitled “Four Ways the Blockchain Will Make the World a Better Place”

Here is what was written about us on Nasdaq.com:

“The blockchain is also being leveraged by startups that aim to improve the democratic process of regional and national elections. Election fraud is a common occurrence in developing countries, but as we have witnessed in the latest U.S. presidential elections, even the most developed countries can struggle to deliver a fair and democratic election process.

Voter registration and vote counting are two areas in which the distributed ledger technology can provide solutions. The blockchain can be used to digitally record all eligible voters and can be used to publicly record every single vote during elections. A startup that is tackling this area is Virginia-based Follow My Vote. Follow My Vote has developed an open-source digital voting platform for governments built on top of the distributed ledger technology with the aim to make elections more transparent and democratic.”

The article goes on to mention the following companies who are also making the world a better place with blockchain technology:

AID:Tech is currently working on digital identities for refugees.

Bitland & ChromaWay are separate companies both working on recording land ownership.

And BitGive tracks financial donations with blockchain.

The status of Follow My Vote

The article focuses on the application of our blockchain voting software for governments, and while it is true that our software could completely revolutionize government elections, we are not actively working with any governments to provide voting services at this time. Contact us if you represent a government, and wish to learn more about blockchain voting.

The truth is, our blockchain voting software has applications in numerous industries. To learn more, explore our use cases under the “Our Technology” tab.

Since our completion of the stake weighted voting software for BitShares, we are open to new contracts and business relationships.  We build open source end-to-end verifiable blockchain voting software.

Source: Nasdaq.com

Read this post on Steemit: steemit.com/@followmyvote

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

The post Nasdaq.com Features Follow My Vote & How Blockchain Will Make the World a Better Place appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Back in August of 2016, we announced that we had completed the initial alpha version of our stake-weighted voting software. Now, we’re letting the world know that we’ve successfully integrated our stake-weighted voting software with the BitShares blockchain. Our stake-weighted voting software serves as the foundation for the development of our more advanced and anonymous 1-person 1-vote blockchain voting system.

We decided to target the BitShares blockchain as the first public blockchain to integrate our blockchain voting software with because the BitShares blockchain runs on a high performance blockchain protocol known as the Graphene Blockchain Framework. We are also very familiar with BitShares’ blockchain protocol, as Follow My Vote’s CTO, Nathan Hourt, along with the Founder of BitShares, Daniel Larimer, were the chief architects of the Graphene Blockchain Framework. It goes without saying that our familiarity with this blockchain protocol was all the more reason to start with the BitShares blockchain.

It’s important to note that, when designing our stake-weighted voting system’s architecture, we designed it in such a way to ensure that our blockchain voting software was portable from one blockchain to another. If you are interested in learning more about the architecture behind our blockchain voting software, be sure to check out the diagram below for a closer look at our stake-weighted voting system’s architectural design:

Now that we’ve successfully integrated our stake-weighted voting software with the BitShares blockchain, we thought it would be best to create a tutorial on how you can get our software up and running on your device.

Steps To Get Follow My Vote’s Stake Weighted Voting Software Running On Your Device:

Anyone that wishes to run our blockchain voting software to conduct a stake-weighted poll on the BitShares blockchain can visit our open-source code repository on github.com and compile the software themselves, regardless of the device and operating system you are using.

If you are interested in doing so, here’s the link:

https://github.com/FollowMyVote/StakeWeightedVoting

For those out there that don’t have the technical skills to do this on their own, don’t worry. Help is on the way! In the days ahead, we will be developing binary files specific to all major operating systems, to include Linux, Mac, Windows, IOS, and Android.

Currently, we only support both Mac and Linux based computing systems.

DOWNLOAD AND INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS – FOR LINUX USERS

For those of you that have a Linux operating system installed on your computer, you can install our blockchain voting software by installing Follow My Vote’s Stake Weighted Voting snap package.

What is a snap package, you ask?

Snap packages, or ‘Snaps’, made their debut in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. A Snap is a fancy zip file containing an application together with its dependencies, and a description of how it should safely be run on your system. Snaps can run on other Linux distributions, including Arch, Fedora, Linux Mint, CentOS and Gentoo. As such, Snaps are quickly becoming the de-facto Linux app package format.

To install Follow My Vote’s Stake Weighted Voting snap package, all you need to do is open up a terminal and run the following command:

“sudo snap install –edge stakeweightedvoting”

Once you’ve installed Follow My Vote’s Stake Weighted Voting snap package, you should be able to find the application on your computer by searching for “Stake Weighted Voting”.

DOWNLOAD AND INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS – FOR MAC USERS

If you have a Mac, you can download Follow My Vote’s Stake Weighted Voting Mac binary file directly from our github repository at the link below:

https://github.com/FollowMyVote/StakeWeightedVoting/releases/download/1.0-beta/VotingApp.dmg

Once you’ve downloaded the Mac binary file, you’ll need to open the application using the DiskImageMounter. From there, you should see voting application listed as a device named “VotingApp by Follow My Vote” in the Devices section of the Finder.

LAUNCHING OUR STAKE-WEIGHTED VOTING APP

Upon locating the application on your computer, go ahead and launch our Stake Weighted Voting app. Then, you’ll need to open your web browser of choice and visit the following URL:

https://bitshares.followmyvote.com/#/connect/web%2Bbts%3A127.0.0.1%2F27073

The above URL will take you to a web-based version of the BitShares wallet configured to work with our Stake Weighted Voting app. You’ll need to export your keys from your existing BitShares wallet and import them into this new wallet. Once this step has been completed, the Stake Weighted Voting app should sync with the blockchain and load all of the contests that have been created to date.

NOTE: if you don’t already have a BitShares wallet, you can create one by visiting the following URL:

https://bitshares.openledger.info/#/create-account

Once you’ve reached this point, you should be able to vote on any of the existing contests or create a contest of your own. Please keep in mind, however, that when contests are created, the creator must choose an asset on the BitShares blockchain for which to weight votes cast in that contest. This means that in order to vote in a contest, you must hold the asset the contest pertains to in your BitShares wallet. Otherwise you won’t be able to vote in that contest.

As a final note, we wanted to you know that we’ve created a demo video of our blockchain voting software so that you can see it in action. Enjoy!

About the author: Adam Ernest is the CEO of Follow My Vote.

The post It’s Alive! …Follow My Vote Launches Blockchain Voting Software On The BitShares Blockchain appeared first on Follow My Vote.