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.

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.

The alpha version runs on a blockchain using the open-source Graphene Blockchain Framework.

Follow My Vote on GitHub

Features and functionality that can be explored in the alpha release include publishing of contests, casting votes, and tallying contest results. TLS Encryption using the blockchain as the certificate authority has also been established for client and server communication.

“I am excited to present the alpha of our stake-weighted voting system. Although it is not yet feature complete, this version has the core components, all utilizing a live Graphene blockchain as the data store and public key infrastructure. This alpha serves not only as a demonstration of our technology, but also as the foundation for development of our more advanced anonymous, verified identity system which we will use to run a parallel election to the United States Presidential Election in November.”

– Nathan Hourt, Co-Founder & CTO – Follow My Vote

Stakeweighted Voting Explained

Stakeweighted voting is not like voting in a typical political election. It is based on the idea that not all voters should have an equal amount of influence over the outcome of an election or contest. A great example is shareholder voting for a corporation. If you own 60% of a company, you would want to have voting power that corresponds with your level of ownership in the company.

Follow My Vote plans to offer shareholder and proxy voting services around the world. Learn more.

First Application

One of the first real applications for the stakeweighted voting software will be with Follow My Vote MERITs, which are digital crypto-currency tokens. When Follow My Vote is deciding on features to build into the open-source software, we will run stake-weighted polls within the voting software to prioritize development based on market demand. These polls will be weighted in MERIT. Therefore, holders of MERIT will help set the direction of Follow My Vote’s software development.

MERITs proved to be one of the more popular rewards offered during our Kickstarter campaign. We are excited to start getting feedback from both customers and supporters.

Become a Follow My Vote Supporter!

Is The Stakeweighted Voting Software For Political Elections?

No, the stake-weighted voting software is meant to be used for shareholder and proxy voting. Follow My vote is currently building functionality for 1 person 1 vote type elections, which will cater towards typical elections held by governments.

About Follow My Vote:

Follow My Vote develops open-source blockchain voting software that supports early voting from mobile devices and provides immediate transparency into election results by allowing voters to independently audit the ballot box to ensure that election results are honest.

See The Official Press Release

Learn how to set up a Graphene blockchain testnet and run the alpha.

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

The post Follow My Vote Releases Initial Alpha appeared first on Follow My Vote.