Democratic Party

There were 86 new delegates up for grabs on Tuesday night. Sanders took 47 of them and won 56 percent of the vote. This pushes his total delegate count to 1097. Breaking that number down, however, reveals that 1066 are pledged delegates (cannot change their vote), and only 31 are superdelegates. And that takes us to Clinton, who took home 36 new delegates, pushing her total to 1778. However, when breaking down her delegate count, only 1295 are pledged, while 483 are superdelegates. Taking away the superdelegate count, which can change their allegiance at any time, the race is becoming increasingly closer than many ever imagined. The candidates will head to Wyoming and then back east to New York in the coming weeks.

Republican Party

The biggest story of the night came out of the Republican primary. Once thought to be a long shot, a contested convention is no longer just an idea. If no candidate reaches the 1,237 delegate mark, that is exactly what will happen at the Republican convention in July. Cruz took Wisconsin with 48 percent of the vote, and gained 36 new delegates. Cruz’s delegate total is now at 510.  Trump did take home 6 new delegates, pushing his total to 743. Kasich still sits at 145 delegates, and faces a nearly impossible mathematical chance of picking up enough delegates. The candidates head east to New York, Trump’s home state, in the coming weeks.

“Trump needs to win 55 percent of the delegates that remain to be awarded. Cruz needs to win more than 80 percent of the remaining delegates up for grabs to secure the nomination – a difficult task even with momentum.”

– Steve Holland, Reuters

At Follow My Vote, we envision an open source, end-to-end verifiable voting system. Vote where you count, and sign up below for the 2016 Parallel Presidential Election. Help us make history in 2016.

About the author: Tyler Molihan is a Marketing Intern at Follow My Vote. He hopes to increase awareness about the benefits of online voting systems.

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Consider: 2012 primary had 300,000 voters and 200 polling places. 2016 primary has estimated 800,000 voters at 60 polling places. #12News

— JOE DANA (@JoeDanaReports) March 23, 2016

At PHX polling site. 7:30pm: line is 3K+ long. Voters at front been waiting for 4+ hrs. #AZPrimary #WesternTuesday pic.twitter.com/hVXUKhNmgo

— Dylan Roberts (@DRobCO) March 23, 2016

“We the people ask for a revote of the Arizona primary due to voter suppression. Many registered voters who registered Democrat/Republican before the cut off or who have been registered Democrat/Republican for many years are being turned down due to the mislabeling of their registered party for the primary. We ask that this immediately be corrected and fixed and allow the residents of Arizona to participate in a revote for honest Arizona primary voting results.”

– petitions.whitehouse.gov 

A recent article from IVN details the 1.2 million registered voters in Arizona who were not able to participate. These voters were barred from participating simply due to being registering as Independent. This bloc represents more than a third of all Arizona voters. Some Independent voters were not even aware of the participation ban, only to be turned away after hours of waiting in line. Others reported that they were registered as Democrats, only to be told that they were listed as ‘Independent’ or ‘No Party Listed’ in the voter database. There has even been a White House petition calling for a revote in the state due to the voter database discrepancies. At the time of writing this, the petition has 96,000 signatures.

The Arizona voting disaster is the most recent of a long list of voting discrepancies this election cycle. We should end the craziness and move to transparent, blockchain voting. At Follow My Vote, we are developing an open source, end-to-end verifiable voting system. Vote where you count, and sign up below for the 2016 Parallel Presidential Election. Help us make history in 2016.

About the author: Tyler Molihan is a Marketing Intern at Follow My Vote. He hopes to increase awareness about the benefits of online voting systems.

The post Outcry Over Arizona Voter Suppression appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Follow My Vote’s CEO, Adam Ernest, recently met with Gary Johnson at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C. Johnson said he would be willing to give his support to what Follow My Vote is doing in the days ahead.

Unsurprisingly, it is rather difficult to find many major media publications discussing it. It is important to remember that Americans DO have alternative choices in the 2016 presidential election. We will certainly be tuning in tonight to see what all of the candidates have to say. Matt Welch from Reason will also be holding a post-debate critique.

At Follow My Vote, we are developing an open source, end-to-end verifiable voting system. Vote where you count, and sign up below for the 2016 Parallel Presidential Election. Help us make history in 2016.

UPDATE: Check out all the clips and highlights from the debate!

About the author: Tyler Molihan is a Marketing Intern at Follow My Vote. He hopes to increase awareness about the benefits of online voting systems.

The post TONIGHT: First Nationally Televised Libertarian Debate appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Voting Laws & Requirements

Source: The U.S. Vote Foundation

The post Confused On How To Vote In Your State? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

In the video, one can learn two things; (1) everyone knows who Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton is, and (2) it seems as if all other candidates do not stand a chance of capturing the attention of millennials. So, what does this mean for voter turnout? Voter turnout, especially with millennials, is characterized on how well they can identify with a candidate and how well they can give a candidate name recognition.

However, for this generation, most tend to think outside of the two-party realm of politics and often have independent views of their own. In a New America report, The Civic and Political Participation of Millennials, through a poll it showed that 50% of millennials identified at politically independent, and of the entire polled population that claimed to be independent, 50% were millennials.

For politicians, this could mean trouble. Because of these non-partisan views, this generation often spends effort and time outside of political campaigns and lobbying and more time in community; which, for civil engagement is a good thing. Though little involved in politics as a whole, this generation is often involved in community volunteering, consumer activism and spearheading other civic campaigns on digital platforms such as blogs, websites and social media.

The issue is not “why aren’t they engaged with politics and elections” but rather “why aren’t political candidates engaging with them and going where they are.”

About the author:  Justin Ashwell is a Marketing Intern at Follow My Vote.

The post Where Are The Millennials At? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

– Democracy For America Endorsement Poll

DFA chose to open the polls to everyone, because they want as much grass roots activity as possible. While this group favors Democratic candidates, Follow My Vote is more interested with the group’s trust in an online voting system.

“While the group will send the ballot to all members, anyone is allowed to vote online between Dec. 7 and Dec. 15, with the group allowing one vote per valid email address.”

However, the Follow My Vote team has already pointed out key areas that can be legitimized in their system. As we see it, the DFA’s endorsement poll security can be described as, “Please don’t.” What we mean by this, is that the group is counting on no one to interfere with the poll. How can someone interfere, you ask? Well, it appears that the only prerequisite to participating is giving a unique email address. Anyone can produce multiple unique emails to have their vote counted more than once. A novel, grassroots concept could easily turn into ballot stuffing for an endorsement that does not reflect the popular vote.

The Follow My Vote team is offering a secure and verifiable online voting system to any business or organization that would like to conduct a poll such as DFA’s. We value words like grassroots, popular vote, and accuracy. The idea of a grassroots, popular vote is what we are all about at FMV, and we would be more than happy to collaborate with any interested parties.

For more information on how our technology works visit: What is Blockchain Technology?

About the author: Tyler Molihan is a Marketing Intern at Follow My Vote. He hopes to increase awareness about the benefits of online voting systems.

The post Online Voting Progress? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

A consensus has formed around the proposition that polling, especially in multi-candidate presidential races, has become inaccurate and unreliable.

This judgment, rendered by respected experts, exposes the absurdity and corruption of the recent decision by the Commission on Presidential Debates to continue using polls to determine who will be on the stage in the fall of 2016.

Jill Lepore’s excellent article in the Nov. 16 issue of The New Yorker is only the latest in a series of authoritative pieces providing evidence of how “horse-race” polling isn’t working anymore – and explaining why. Dan Balz made similar points in a Washington Post article on Nov. 7. Michael Barone, the dean of election analysts, co-founder of The Almanac of American Politics, and pollster himself for nine years, made the case against polling on Nov. 11 in the Wall Street Journal. He also quoted his American Enterprise Institute colleague, Karlyn Bowman, saying that this may be “the end of polling as we know it.”

The New York Times has run several pieces on the subject, including an op-ed in June by Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers scholar who is past president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research.

Dr. Zukin concluded:

“We are less sure how to conduct good survey research now than we were four years ago, and much less than eight years ago… In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we’re off base.”

The evidence abounds. It includes the Israeli and British elections and, on Nov. 3, the Kentucky governor’s race. The polls had the Democrat winning, but the Republican won in what was practically a landslide, 53% to 44%.

The reasons for the declining accuracy of polls are now well known:

• sharply falling response rates by voters called for their opinions,
• the difficulty and expense involved in reaching people who have abandoned land lines for cell phones (a law bans auto-dialing to mobile phones),
• and the near-impossibility of adjusting results to achieve the proper weighting of demographic groups and to determine which of the respondents will actually show up to vote.

As a result, Gallup, the premier U.S. polling organization, announced recently that it would not poll for the primaries this year and might not poll for the general election either.

But the main problem with polling is the uses to which it is being put – especially making it the main criterion for admission to debates. Lepore quotes Scott Keeter, director of survey research for Pew: “I don’t think polling is really up to the task of deciding the field for the headliner debate.”

Read more at: ivn.us

The post Polls Are Ineffective, So Why Do We Trust Them? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

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The GOP primary debates in August and September were ratings blockbusters, in large part because the Republican Party has degenerated into a drunken circus. But notwithstanding the fact that three of the candidates on stage Tuesday night—former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley; former Senator Jim Webb; former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee—have negligible support among Democratic voters, and thus a big incentive to make an impression, the first Democratic debate is expected to be a more sober, and lower-rated event.

An obvious, but undermentioned reality of U.S. politics at the moment  is that making a splash in the Democratic party doesn’t require grasping for reactionary, unpopular policy positions, while in the Republican party, it does.

But just because the Democratic candidates don’t deny climate change, or promise to build walls along our borders and deport all of our unauthorized immigrants, doesn’t make them immune to trafficking in fantasy. And that makes it incumbent upon us in the media to clearly distinguish between the candidates’ ideological preferences, and the promises they’ll reliably be able to keep.

The gloomy truth about the 2016 campaign is that while Democratic candidates, like Republican candidates, must campaign on aspirations, all of them are aware that if the country elects a Democrat in 2016, he or she will probably inherit a Republican House, and perhaps a Republican Senate as well, significantly limiting the potential scope of liberal reform.

Democratic candidates can draw strong ideological distinctions between one another, but their presidencies will be circumscribed by less lofty constraints like political strategy and technocratic imagination.

For instance: Bernie Sanders wants college to be free for everyone; Hillary Clinton wants to means test tuition subsidies. This tells you something important about the different roles the two candidates think the federal government should play in our higher education system, but almost nothing about how higher education policy would change in a Sanders or Clinton presidency.

Tuesday night’s debate is an opportunity to sort abstract preferences from the likely governing constraints a Democratic president will face in 2017, and to assess the candidates’ strategic thinking about how to work through or around those constraints.

We already know how the leading candidates propose to grapple with polarization and gridlock. Clinton has consistently argued that making progress in our system of government today requires an appetite and instinct for partisan combat—a theory bolstered by the massive resistance with which Republicans responded to President Barack Obama’s promise of accommodation and bipartisanship.

Read more at: newrepublic.com.

The post Campaign Promises vs. Actual Governing appeared first on Follow My Vote.

The Democratic National Committee has announced a schedule of six presidential primary debates, beginning on October 13. 2015 in Nevada.

The party made the announcement on the same day that the Republican candidates are set to debate for the first time in Cleveland, Ohio.

Just four of the Democratic debates will be held before the key early nominating contests begin early next year.

After the October debate in Nevada, which will be hosted by CNN, the next Democratic debates are: November 14 in Des Moines, IA (hosted by CBS, KCCI and the Des Moines Register); December 19 in Manchester, NH (hosted by ABC and WMUR); and January 17 in Charleston, SC (hosted by NBC News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute).

Debates are also scheduled to be held in February or March in both Miami and Wisconsin, with dates to be announced.

Two of Clinton’s rivals have said they are upset about the way the party has scheduled the debates.

“By inserting themselves into the debate process, the DNC has ironically made it less democratic. The schedule they have proposed does not give voters—nationally, and especially in early states—ample opportunity to hear from the Democratic candidates for President,” former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley said in a statement.

Read more at: nbcnews.com.

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