All proceeds from the successful kickstarter campaign will go toward our Parallel Presidential Election Experience. In November, we are hosting a mock election in parallel to the 2016 United States Presidential Election to demonstrate our technology.

We would like to say thank you to all our backers and everyone who helped share the Kickstarter and raise awareness for the problems we are trying to address in our elections industry.

Hi Backers!

I want you to know that I LOVE you with ALL of my heart!

When I first started out on this journey, I had no idea how the world would respond. It is Good to know that the world has opened up to being honest.

Today, on the 4th of July, I’m thrilled to announce that we hit our Kickstarter campaign fundraising goal! We couldn’t have done it without you.

I am FOREVER grateful.

It was a wild ride. Thanks for coming along. We will be reaching out to each AND every one of you in the days ahead to ensure you receive your reward(s).

We will ALWAYS prevail!

ONE LOVE,

– Adam Kaleb Ernest, Follow My Vote Co-Founder & CEO

Next Steps

We will be spending the next few weeks sending rewards to all of our backers.

We will also be reaching out to the winners of our Hokie Fan Challenge and our Social Sharing Giveaway.

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

The post Follow My Vote Achieves Kickstarter Funding Goal appeared first on Follow My Vote.

We learned tricks, tips, and lessons from our first campaign. We even made a blog post titled “8 Mistakes To Avoid When Launching Your Kickstarter.” Everything we learned from the first campaign we are pouring into our Kickstarter reboot.

Our second campaign will be slightly different. As stated above, our goal is much lower and we are now focusing on one single Follow My Vote initiative, the parallel election.

The 2016 Parallel Presidential Election will run alongside the actual US Presidential Election in November giving people the chance to experience a modern voting system that uses the blockchain. Obviously, U.S. citizens should still participate in the “legitimate” election even though you can’t prove your vote counted or wasn’t changed.

Follow My Vote will pay the cost of the mock election. While blockchain voting software is extremely cheap compared to current election costs, we want to include as many participants as we can. A successful Kickstarter reboot will make this possible.

Who Else Did A Reboot?

Follow My Vote is not the first company to do a Kickstarter reboot. The Coolest cooler did a reboot and broke Kickstarter’s funding record.  The project was based on a crazy cooler that came with a cutting board, blender, Bluetooth speaker and USB charger.

The Coolest cooler set a goal of $125,000 for the first campaign, which failed. On their reboot they set a goal of $50,000 and their Kickstarter took off like a wild fire. This second campaign ultimately received $13 million in funding.

 How To Help

Donate! And, donate asap! To take advantage of Kickstarter’s viral algorithm, a campaign must meet 30% of its goal within its first 3 days. This means the campaign may get featured on the front page of Kickstarter, mentioned on the Kickstarter Twitter feed and shown to people who are likely to donate.

Join one of our contests! We have a GIF sharing contest as well as a viral email marketing campaign you can join! (all participants who joined previously will retain chances to win)

Social Sharing Giveaway

How To Enter:

Step 1: Sign up below.

Step 2: Share your unique link with friends.

Step 3: Check your progress at any time during the contest.

By getting 2 other people to enter the contest, you will be entered to win a FREE Apple iPad Air 16GB WiFi tablet!

Prize Value: $250

See the top 6 ways to help our Kickstarter for more ways to help the campaign.

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

The post Announcing The Follow My Vote Kickstarter Reboot! appeared first on Follow My Vote.

On this episode we sat down to discuss and enjoy Devils Backbone, which just got acquired by AB-InBev.

We also talked about our crowdfunding campaign which just launched! If you haven’t heard, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the voting platform of the future, powered by blockchain technology. The project aims to bring transparency, convenience, and security to elections and polls of all kinds.

You can listen to the podcast below:

Follow the AM Hodge Podge Radio Show on Facebook and Twitter!

See more behind the scenes photos in our Facebook Album.

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

The post Local Radio Round 2! Follow My Vote & AM Hodge Podge Radio appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Watch us literally launch the campaign in this video:

Join our movement on social media with the hashtags #WeAreTheFuture and #HonestElections.

Follow My Vote is solving the current voting crisis with innovative technologies. A voting platform that can gain transparency into elections, without compromising voter privacy will ensure that election results are accurate. Follow My Vote is accomplishing this by using blockchain technology and elliptic curve cryptography to build an open-source platform that is secure and truly verifiable from end to end.

The funds raised from the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign will go towards completion of the project and demonstrating the power of blockchain voting to the world.

Press Release

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

The post Follow My Vote Launches Crowdfunding Campaign To Change The World appeared first on Follow My Vote.

This article takes a look at some great ideas that you can implement into your petition strategy to make sure that the mass of people you have assembled behind your cause is well led and instructed. Being a good leader will help to focus your group and make sure that benchmarks are met.

What are some tools that you can think of that would make the charge of a petition stronger still?

Online petitions are everywhere. Increasingly news stories contain the line “an online petition has attracted thousands of signatures”, while Twitter and Facebook feeds are awash with people looking for support. The Government likes them so much they set up their own site. But are they any good and do they work?

My answer (unsurprisingly from someone who runs the UK branch of the world’s largest petition site) is ‘yes’ – but in themselves, petitions are only the start of a dynamic and exciting campaign journey. Petitions can win with ten signatures or with 10 million signatures. Despite the best efforts of the UK government to make 100,000 signatures the arbitrary petition signer threshold for access to our own elected leaders, there are no hard and fast rules. It’s not the size of the petition, it’s what the signers do that counts.

Petitions are simply a big group of people. As such they are the basis of your movement – the army you assemble to march toward your target. An un-commanded army is just a group of people ambling about. When you start the petition you are the general of this army and the soldiers need to be well commanded and well armed. In this incredibly stretched metaphor, you arm them with tactics to convey the message.

On Change.org we have hundreds of examples of ordinary individuals who’ve got people to do extraordinary things. One of the best is Lucy Holmes who has been using Change.org (as well as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, TV and newspapers) to ask the editor of the Sun newspaper to drop page three.

She’s got an 85,000 strong petition which, in and of itself, won’t win it alone. It’s the activity around it – the two way conversation she has with her supporters that makes the campaign so powerful. It’s the creative tactics like Leanne (a ‘Lego page 3 model’) that engages existing supporters, brings in new ones and generates publicity: a virtuous circle that’s made this one of the biggest people powered movements of recent times.

Then there’s Jayne Linney – ATOS wouldn’t record her disability assessment after continually getting her details wrong, despite ministerial statements that they would do. She started a Change.org petition and got a relatively modest 1,500 signatures but by combining this with traditional tactics like writing to MPs and calling local journalists she won her campaign too.

There was a great line in a local newspaper about a petition on our site, “the petition gathered over 12 signatures in two days” it’s easy to laugh – but it proves that there’s no magic number. And nor should there be. Campaigning is about taking people on a journey, engaging them in conversation and making them think about what they’re doing.

Read More Here: theguardian.com.

The post Learn How to Start Your Own Online Petition appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Follow My Vote is a new start-up working hard to build a mobile app to empower “We the People” of the United States of America to hold our elected officials accountable. We’d like to be able to give away this application for free, but we’re going to need to raise some start-up money in order to make this a possibility, which is why we recently launched a crowdfunding campaign.

There is only 7 days left for us to raise funds through our crowdfunding campaign, which ends at midnight (PST) on November 14th. At this point, we have raised 12% percent of our goal. With your help, we’re confident we can raise the remaining 88% in the coming days.

If you are reading this post, please be sure to check out our crowdfunding video below and consider contributing to our cause.

$5 a person (the price of a cup of coffee from Starbucks) is really all we are asking for. If you can afford to contribute more, please do!

On the other hand, if you can’t afford to contribute anything, we completely understand. All we ask is that you share this page with just one of your friends or family members and ask them to do the same.

THANKS FOR YOUR HELP!!!

The post 7 Days To Make A Difference appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Thankfully, due to the rare compromise from our elected officials, we just avoided crashing through the United States’ debt ceiling, an event with potentially catastrophic consequences, one that could have sent the US and global economy into yet another damaging recession.

Although our elected officials can’t seem to agree on anything these days, a new study NBC is conducting argues that the people of the United States of America, “We the People”, actually tend to agree on much more than we disagree when it comes to the issues. Yet, due to partisan politics in the United States, “We the People” have been led to believe differently.

At the end of the day, if we want to progress as a society, building on what we have in common in order to prevent things like this happening again, “We the People” must begin holding our elected officials accountable.

Follow My Vote is a nonpartisan organization aiming to bridge the gap between the citizens of the United States and our elected officials to ensure that “We the People” are accurately represented as a society moving forward. In doing so, our hope is that we put an end to partisan politics in the United States and make way for progress that “We the People” truly support.

If you believe in our cause, please help us spread the word and/or contribute to our crowdfunding campaign today!

Source:
washingtonpost.com
nbcnews.com

The post Too Close For Comfort appeared first on Follow My Vote.

To make matters worse, all of the commotion occurring in Washington D.C. seems to have created a lot of confusion among Americans with respect to what raising the debt ceiling actually means.

To be clear, raising the debt ceiling in the United States would only allow the federal government to pay its outstanding bills, for things like military pay and Social Security. However, it does NOT give the government authority to increasing spending.

The harsh reality is that if an agreement can’t be reached in Washington D.C. by October 17^th, the United States debt ceiling will expire, our nation will default on our outstanding loans, our credit rating will be lowered, and our currency will be devalued.

Being that such an event would have catastrophic effects on the United States economy and the global economy at large, Congress has raised the debt ceiling a total of 94 times since 1940 without much of a fuss. But, for one reason or another, this time is different.

Since the shutdown began, talks between President Obama and top GOP officials in the House of Representatives went virtually nowhere. As the deadline grows near, however, “We the People” are actively exercising our right to speak freely.

Yesterday, crowds gathered in Washington D.C. to speak out against the federal government’s inability to work together to reach a resolution. Both liberal and conservative demonstrators held protests at many of Washington D.C.’s landmarks, voicing their frustrations with the current situation. Tea Party enthusiasts were even seen toppling barricades and stacking them right in front of the White House lawn. Generally, it seems the consensus among citizens of the United States is that the federal government is broken and something must be done in order to fix it.

At this point, it seems that our best chance to reach a resolution lies in the hands of the United States Senate, with talks between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell scheduled to resume today. Although Harry Reid was recently quoted as saying “I’m optimistic about the prospects of a positive conclusion,” senators seem to be squarely divided over how much federal spending should be permitted in a budget extension that would reopen the federal government and how long any new borrowing limit should last. The thing is that. even if the Senate reaches an agreement in the next few days, there’s no telling how the House of Representatives will respond.

With the debt ceiling deadline swiftly approaching, one thing is clear: “We the People” are running out of patience.

Some Americans have even taken matters into their own hands and have chosen to pick up where the government left off. John and Laura Arnold, for instance, have donated $10M to Head Start, where their doors have been reopened and children are now getting the education they need.

We at Follow My Vote believe that “We the People” should be able to take all governmental matters into our hands at all times, especially to prevent situations like this from occurring in the future.

We envision our mobile app, which is currently in development, as being the only viable long-term solution for true accountability in Washington D.C.

Our journey through the long and winding road to true freedom will not be easy and will likely be a costly endeavor.

On that note, we recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the continued development of our mobile application beyond the initial version, in order to support much more functionality and an improved user experience based on customer feedback.

If you’d like this to be the last shutdown “We the People” in the United States are forced to go through, please contribute to our crowdfunding campaign today!

The post Shutdown Showdown appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, a speech that changed the world…forever!

To commemorate his historic speech, which took place on August 28th, 1963, thousands of people flocked to Washington D.C. to remember that moment, a sheer act of courage from someone who paid the ultimate price for standing up for what he believed in. Also, President Obama, Clinton, and Carter as well as many other prominent speakers took the podium at the Lincoln Memorial and addressed the crowd. (WATCH: Presidents Obama, Clinton and Carter Speak at the event)

Ahead of this event, TIME Magazine released their ‘I Have A Dream’ Anniversary Issue,’ honoring Martin Luther King Jr. as a ‘Founding Father’ of the United States.

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the rest of the Founding Father of the United States of America, if you are willing and able to contribute to our cause, we are prepared to honor you by posting your name on our website as an honorary “Founding Father” of Follow My Vote!

The post Crowdfunding Campaign Just Launched! appeared first on Follow My Vote.