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.

As we are researching and developing new platform technologies necessary to someday support the development of online voting systems, we take note of others in the industry working toward such systems; especially those also using blockchain technology.

One such company is Voatz, and today I’d like to highlight their efforts and share some thoughts about their work. Let me preface this by saying that this is just one man’s opinion and perspective. I have no affiliation with Voatz, and have not closely examined their work. My words here should be viewed merely as the casual commentary of an interested bystander.

Voatz is working on solutions for an online voting app using blockchain as a durable record of the election procedures and results. They are developing the procedures and workflows necessary to conducting an online election, and creating the tools and interfaces to administrate and participate in such an election, and showing the world what it could look like.

In the course of developing these procedures, Voatz ran a pilot of their app, giving voters and administrators alike a taste of what online voting could be like, and sometime thereafter, they came under fire for the security stance of their pilot system. A team of advanced security researchers at MIT wrote a paper decrying the Voatz pilot as an insecure approach to online elections and warning the public that such solutions cannot be trusted to uphold the operations of modern democracy. Shortly thereafter, security firm Trail of Bits published a report outlining vulnerabilities in Voatz’ application and infrastructure in greater detail.

These events seem to have led to a great deal of uncertainty and doubt of Voatz’ suitability as a provider of solutions in the elections space. If their pilot was so insecure, can the company be trusted to produce solutions for use in secure elections?

As one trained in the same kind of cybersecurity analysis and techniques as were employed by the research team at MIT, I would like to share my view on these events. Elections are enormously complex endeavors that require coordination of many people and organizations, and this succeeds today by using various different procedures and methods, but a transition to online voting will massively disrupt these procedures, and nobody is yet sure how that can possibly work. Voatz is helping to find ways that it can, even while the full security architecture of a final solution is still uncertain. To do this, Voatz is working with security standards well understood by the industry today, building voting system demonstrations based on the standards we might expect from existing major tech companies.

The MIT review raises legitimate concerns about the viability of Voatz’ approach for secure elections. In a sense, the MIT researchers are pointing out that while they themselves don’t know what the security architecture of a fitting solution for online elections would be, they can clearly see that the Voatz approach isn’t it. And while this may be true, it completely misses the value of Voatz’ contribution. Voatz is showing us how online elections can look, even before the full picture of how they can work comes into focus. It doesn’t exhibit the final security architecture, and it doesn’t need to: Voatz is building to the security standards we understand today to show us how the final solution could look tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the Trail of Bits report was commissioned by Voatz to evaluate the security of their pilot against the standards Voatz was aiming for, and the vulnerabilities disclosed by that report, while serious in nature, are not fundamental flaws, and should be relatively easy to fix.

In conclusion, we at Follow My Vote are grateful to Voatz for the work they are doing to further the conversation on how online voting solutions may look in the future, how online elections can be orchestrated, and what it will be like to participate in them. We look forward to seeing what they produce next, even as we are researching and developing the foundations and underpinnings that will eventually enable applications to be deployed meeting the full security, privacy, and end-to-end verifiability requirements necessary to support modern political elections online.

The post A Word for Voatz appeared first on Follow My Vote.

These dApps (or decentralized applications) are similar to standard apps except that they run on a decentralized network of computers, not one centralized location. They will operate in a similar fashion to normal apps in terms of the user-interface (UI), but will essentially be based on a smart contract. They are seen as the future of blockchain by many and allow people to both use and participate in the services offered by these dApps.

While there are numerous places that these dApps can be hosted, many dApps found their home on the Ethereum blockchain. It has been around for years. Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency according to its total market cap, and the third most expensive coin in terms of USD (i.e. $260 per Ether). It is a safe bet as it hosts thousands of different dApps. However, recently, a new contender has risen to the occasion and is giving Ethereum a run for its money. That contender is EOS. But why? What makes EOS and its blockchain attract so many projects and people away from Ethereum?

With that in mind, this article is going to take a look at a few reasons why more dApps are beginning to move over to the EOS ecosystem. However, before looking at why dApps are making the switch, let’s learn a little about EOS itself and how it came to be.

What is EOS?

EOS is a powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications. They make it simple to design dApps that are both vertically and horizontally scalable, as well as ensuring usability and flexibility. All different types of apps can be created – from ones to share music to ones to track your fitness and everything in between.

EOS is a new kid on the crypto block, as its ICO began in June 2017. In total, their ICO was able to raise over $4 billion, despite them not even having a live product, which was unheard of. According to the amount raised, this was the largest ICO in history. Several big players and notable names were investors during its ICO.

Despite being so new, EOS is already making waves in the crypto world. In addition to having the largest ICO ever, EOS is also the 6^th largest cryptocurrency on the planet according to its total market cap. So now that you know a little about EOS, let’s finally take a look at why so many dApps are moving over to the EOS blockchain.

Reasons for dApps Moving to the EOS Ecosystem

It Runs Smoothly

First of all, EOS is said to run much more smoothly than other blockchains like Ethereum and NEO. When many transactions are being processed on the Ethereum blockchain, it tends to take a decent amount of time and be a little choppy. This type of thing is not an issue with EOS.

Scalability is one of the huge selling points of EOS. It is now able to process over 3000 transactions per second and is believed to scale to million TPS. Whether your app only has a couple of users, or millions, EOS will ensure it runs smoothly and won’t experience any hiccups or crashes. The platform is also capable of handling thousands of different dApps at the same time. Certainly this scalability for large and small projects alike is one reason why more dApps are moving to EOS.

No Transaction Fees for Users

Another gripe many users and developers of dApps have with the likes of Ethereum is the fact that there is a fee for nearly every kind of transaction. While these transaction fees are usually quite small and manageable, they can definitely add up over time. On the other hand, EOS charges no transaction fees, which is obviously a huge plus for users.

This means tokens can be sent free of charge and there is no cost at all to call a smart contract. Of course, developers still have to pay some operating costs. In general, EOS is much more efficient than other options as it uses a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm that doesn’t require traditional mining.

Increased Transaction Speeds

In addition to the platform and dApps running smoothly, and transactions being free, EOS also boasts faster transactions than most other blockchains. As mentioned before, EOS can process thousands and thousands of transactions per second, while many other blockchain systems are only capable of hundreds per second.

By having faster transactions, you ensure that users will have a better experience on your dApp as they won’t have to wait for their transactions to go through. While other blockchain systems could make strides to improve their speed, they have a lot of catching up to do.

So essentially, it is the scalability, speed and low fees that is drawing many creators, developers and publishers to EOS. It remains to be seen just how many dApps will ultimately be hosted on EOS, but plenty have already moved or have said they are planning to do so. While it may be awhile before EOS completely takes over Ethereum for the largest host of dApps, it will be exciting to see what happens as both jockey for the position.

In conclusion, hopefully this article has been able to shed some light on why more dApps are moving to the EOS ecosystem.

About The Author:

Mary Ann Callahan – Follow My Vote Blog Contributor

“As an expert on Bitcoin-related topics, I’ve found myself as a Journalist at Cex.io – cryptocurrency exchange. I’m working on articles related to blockchain security, bitcoin purchase guides or bitcoin regulations in different countries.” – Mary Ann Callahan

Are YOU interested in contributing an article to Follow My Vote’s blog?

Contact Us today to find out how!

The post More dApps are Moving to the EOS Ecosystem – Why? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Did you know that public ledgers have been used for centuries? Blockchain is essentially a more advanced digital version.

Image Source

Stephen Kendal is an advocate of blockchain technology & the applications the tech has for global financial markets and in particular the effects on derivatives & global trade.

Kendal recently wrote an article on Steemit.com detailing a great explanation for blockchain using old fashioned public ledgers:

IT’S JUST A DATABASE

Once you have managed to fix someone’s attention on a Database being nothing more than a digital list of records it is easily then to explain that this digital list of records is no different than the old fashioned written/typed ledger that were around before computers.

By simply breaking it down into bite sized chucks most people will be able to keep up.

Now that they are thinking of a written/typed ledger explain to them that in some occasions these ledgers were made public for everyone to see.

By simply referring back to the old fashioned Public Ledger that have been around for Centuries for the ones that struggle to understand what Blockchain is this is where you have to take them.

Now that they are focused on this old fashioned Public Ledger you are getting close to seal the deal and finally explain what Blockchain is.

PUT THE TWO TOGETHER

Having now explained and focusing their mind on Databases and Public Ledgers simply tell them to put the two together.

At this point you simply say that Blockhain is nothing more than a generic name for a Digital Distributed Public Ledger and is in essence a Database that is shared identically across a network of computers.

Read the full post on Steemit.com

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

The post Public Ledgers Are Not New – Blockchain Technology Is Just a Digital Version appeared first on Follow My Vote.

2017 will be a big year for blockchain. In this blog post, we cover the top areas of the blockchain industry and what we can expect for blockchain in 2017.

There are 7 Banks that want to go live with blockchain in 2017.

A recent CoinDesk article reveals that 7 major European banks are partnering on a new blockchain-based trade finance platform called the Digital Trade Chain (DTC).

They have a tentative plan to launch in Q3-Q4 of 2017.

Those backing the platform’s development are looking to establish a secure place to manage open account trade transactions for both domestic and international commerce. DTC utilizes a permissioned ledger, with authorized parties allowed to submit transactions on the platform.

Open account trade transactions involve products being shipped before the actual payment is due, meaning that trust among the transaction’s parties is imperative. With DTC, those plugged into the system will be able to track the progression of those transactions, from initiation to settlement.

Thus far, the banks involved – KBC, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Société Générale and UniCredit – have signed a memorandum of understanding that lays out the basic groundwork for future development. That said, the banks are looking to launch DTC sometime in 2017, with an eye to building support in markets like France, Germany and the UK.

Conferences involving blockchain in 2017

A conference that caught our eye recently is the MIT Technology Review Conference: The Business of Blockchain.

The event will be held at the MIT Media Lab on April 18, 2017. The purpose of the one-day conference is “to explore the opportunities and challenges associated with public digital ledgers, or blockchains.”

Blockchains have the power to create entirely new kinds of businesses and more people are starting to realize this everyday.

Blockchain is still relatively new. The industry is still in its infancy. We can expect a variety of new use cases to be introduced in 2017.

Bitcoin in 2017

Bitcoin is the largest and most well know blockchain project. It is currently traded all around the world and more businesses are beginning to accept Bitcoin as a means of payment.

In addition to growth and adoption, Bitcoin will focus on security and scalability. The DAO hack demonstrated the need for advanced security protocols for all blockchain projects. Scalability is also an issue.  “Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 3.3 tps (7 tps theoretical) due to the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB. Scalability will remain the holy grail of blockchain technology.”

Ethereum in 2017

Many people believe the public blockchain with the most attainable and impactful scalability roadmap is Ethereum.

Here are some of the Ethereum projects to look out for:

Infura is an enterprise-grade Ethereum-based blockchain infrastructure being used in IoT, and in conjunction with the public Ethereum blockchain and Inter Planetary File System (IPFS). Developers interface with Infura via Web3/RPC.

MetaMask is a bridge that allows you to visit the distributed web of tomorrow in your browser today. It allows you to run Ethereum dApps right in your browser without running a full Ethereum node.

BlockApps is an enterprise-grade Ethereum-based blockchain infrastructure solution used in banking, payments, insurance, supply chain and others. BlockApps is designed to provide a permissioned Ethereum environment which easily operates at scale, allowing applications to handle a high volume of transactions per second. Developers can build interfaces with their permissioned blockchain using a REST API.

Steemit in 2017

Steemit.com is the world’s fastest growing decentralized social media platform. Steemit connects to a robust blockchain database called Steem. This blockchain database distributes rewards in cryptocurrency to the users who bring the best content (blogs, comments, videos etc.) to the Steemit site.

On January 17th, 2017 Steemit.com was featured on Forbes.com. Author, Roger Aitken covered the 2017 comprehensive roadmap for Steemit.com.

The big news surrounds the Steemit.com migration to Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest hosting provider. Steemit has racked up over 120,000 registered users in around 6 months and they need to be able to handle more traffic as the platform grows.

Steemit Co-founder & CEO, Ned Scott is quoted several times throughout the article:

 “2017 will be our banner year and the community will see a ton of upgrades from now until the end of March. Migrating hosting to reputable third parties allows us to focus all of our time and attention on development of the site, software, and community – not on scaling or maintaining servers or hosting infrastructure.”

Follow My Vote in 2017

Follow My Vote continues to pioneer end-to-end verifiable blockchain voting software in 2017. See our Github repo for updates on our software.

In 2016, we managed to get featured on Forbes.com and successfully integrated our stake-weighted voting software 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. (contact us if you are interested in a custom blockchain voting solution)

2016 was filled with momentous achievements for Follow My Vote. Here you can see we reached out to and networked with some of the top technology leaders and politicians. (Gary Johnson & John McAfee featured)

We anticipate that 2017 will be filled with many Follow My Vote software releases and partnerships, in an effort to bring end-to-end verifiable blockchain voting to the world.

Learn about our stake weighted blockchain voting software.

Learn about our 1 person 1 vote blockchain voting software.

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

The post What’s In Store For Blockchain In 2017? 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.

Note* Official Follow My Vote software releases will not have modifications by people who are not Follow My Vote Developers or Code Contributors. Anyone can download, modify, and redistribute the software on their own; however, we cannot guarantee that such unofficial copies will work correctly or be compatible with the official Follow My Vote software.

Currently, Follow My Vote is developing software for both stake weighted elections and one person, one vote elections. This post was created to explain the differences between these two voting platforms.

Two Distinct Voting Systems

Recently we have encountered conversations on social media and other places online where people are confused about which style of voting Follow My Vote supports. Follow My Vote plans to build voting software for any and all use cases that the market demands. However, certain use cases will use different distributions of our software.

One Person, One Vote Voting

Our one person, one vote voting platform is designed primarily for political elections. This method of voting is based on the the principle that all citizens, regardless of where they reside in a state, are entitled to equal legislative representation.

Many countries actually have laws dictating that elections must adhere to this voting method. For example, the United States has applied an Equal Protection Clause to the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. The clause took effect in 1868 and provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction “equal protection of the laws”. The main purpose of the law is to make sure legislative voting districts have the same population size, thus guaranteeing a person’s vote is equal to another person’s vote within the state.

The one person, one vote system will not have the same features and functionality as our other voting systems. There will not be code within the software to simply turn on or off, for example, a stake weighted voting function. It simply won’t be included within the one person, one vote system. However, we encourage skeptics to audit the code base that any given election is running on to verify this. This is the beauty of open source software: anyone can inspect the system and see exactly how it works, and what it does or does not do.

When our one person, one vote system is officially launched, we will offer clients the option to use a special version of our software dedicated to their election. The code and features not used by that election will be stripped out. This will reduce attack surface and eliminate possible points of confusion in the app. The code for the election will also become easier to audit because there will be less code to review.

Stake Weighted Voting

Our stake weighted voting system is meant for elections where not all voters should have the same amount of influence over the outcome of an election. A perfect use case is shareholder voting in a company. If Alice owns 60% of a company, her vote shouldn’t count equally with the other shareholders. Votes should be weighted according to the level of investment. 

There are a few instances of stake weighted voting used by governments. The two most notable are the US Electoral College and the European Council.

Voting Software Release Schedule

Follow My Vote has already released the alpha version of the stake weighted voting platform. This platform is coming out first because it is simpler: in stake weighted voting, there is no additional work necessary to protect voter anonymity as the identity of the voter determines how much weight the vote has.

After we stabilize our platform via the stake weighted voting system, we will use it as a stable and battle-tested foundation for our one person, one vote system. After development of the one person, one vote system is complete, we will prove the technology in the private sector before submitting it for consideration in government elections.
About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote. 

The post The Difference Between Our Stake Weighted & One Person, One Vote Voting Systems appeared first on Follow My Vote.

What is Approval Voting?

Approval Voting is a single-winner voting method in where a voter can approve of any number of candidates. The candidate that gets the most approval votes wins office. This would help eliminate some of the disadvantages third party candidates have. They no longer would be splitting the vote and voters will be more likely to throw their support behind someone they don’t think it will be wasted on. Approval voting can be considered a form of score voting, with two values, 0 and 1—or a form of majority judgment, with grades restricted to good and poor. Approval voting has been adopted by the Mathematical Association of America (1986), the American Mathematical Society, the Institute of Management Sciences (1987), the American Statistical Association (1987), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1987)

Other Options?

Ranked Voting is in which the candidates are ranked in the order of their fitness for the job. The lowest ranked person gets dropped and then all of their votes go to their second choice and so on and so forth. This ensures that the most popular candidate wins the election whereas in the orginial instance of approval voting, it might be the least suitable approved candidate.

Why this matters?

Our current voting system is flawed as I pointed out in the first paragraph. The only way we can change that is by electing people who support changing the voting system and its technology. You can help by joining our Beta signup list and helping us bug-test our code before we try to market it. Through your help, we can make our voting technology more secure and keep candidates who are the least popular out of office.

About the Author: David Brock is a marketing intern at Follow My Vote.

The post Approval Voting appeared first on Follow My Vote.

As a company that is devoted to providing a secure voting system, we feel obligated to comment on the hack as it uses our technology. It is important to note that the bitcoin blockchain has never been hacked, that the hack was conducted on a centralized exchange. This exchange is also by no means the largest, with the breach accounting for just 0.75% of the bitcoin in circulation. Our CTO, Nathan Hourt, commented on the hack by saying, “Indeed, the comments on how this is so bad and scary and this is what’s dangerous about crypto are quite strange… Why is this any more dangerous than any other bookkeeping? This is actually far less dangerous, since now there are cryptographically regulated procedures necessary to carry out changes on the database. A hacker must comply with those procedures, whereas before he was able to do anything he wanted once he hacked into the relevant computer(s).”

Not everyone is convinced that this hack is a legitimate hack either. As the story continues to unfold we will update this post with more information.

The post Why the Bitfinex hack isn’t the downfall of blockchain appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Can’t go back to the past – paper ballots

In David Dill’s article in the Stanford news, he believes that paper ballots is the gold standard we should stick to. But in reality, it’s not like we can go back to paper votes either, the amount of work of tabulating and counting the votes will only increase as the United States’ population increases.  The commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections during a panel about America’s voting technology crisis states: (46:30 in the video below)

Paper ballots also aren’t cheap. We have localities … Fairfax County, for example, they have scanning equipment and the ballots that they got printed. We are talking close to $100,000 just for ballot printing (…) It’s not realistic to expect hand counting after the election, it’s just an incredible task the amount of people and resources required. As Doug mentioned, it also isn’t just as accurate.

David Dill might be a successful computer scientist, but he would probably be a starving economist. The Country just can’t afford to spend $100,000 per county on 3,143 counties in the United States, that’s over 300 billion dollars per election.

The current systems just aren’t working

Dill also talked about how the voting systems can easily be hacked, and there is truth to the statement. The guardian reported in April 2015 that “Touchscreen voting machines used in numerous elections between 2002 and 2014 used “abcde” and “admin” as passwords and could easily have been hacked from the parking lot outside the polling place, according to a state report.” A computer scientist at tech research group SRI International stated that “The AVS WinVote machines, used in three presidential elections in Virginia, ‘would get an F-minus‘ in security.” With both our current system and past system realistically unusable, what do we do you might ask.

The Solution

The solution to this problem is end-to-end verifiable online voting. Follow My Vote hopes to be the lead innovator in this new technology. Through cryptographically secure voting, every machine has to be registered to a user who has been verified through a picture and government ID card along with an ID Key. Each user then has the ability to vote only once, but can change their vote until the poll closes. The blockchain technology allows an individual to audit their vote or the entire election if they wanted to.

About the author: David Brock is a Marketing Intern of Follow My Vote.

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