Nathan Hourt, Follow My Vote Co-founder and CTO, is quoted several times throughout the article. Hourt eloquently explains risks that are neutralized with an end-to-end verifiable system.

We have included part of the Forbes article for you to read:

With accusations of election rigging and an unprecedented hack of a political party’s emails, voting security has not been this hot of an issue since Bush v. Gore and the Florida recount of 2000. Adding fuel to the fire is the FBI’s latest revelation of foreign hacking into two states’ election databases. Now, Washington officials are increasingly concerned that hackers will seek to infiltrate the decades-out-of-date voting machines with very little technical sophistication and manipulate votes cast for the next U.S. president in November.

Some cybersecurity experts have advocated for the ultimate security measure to protect U.S. elections from foreign tampering—that is, offline paper-based elections.

Yet in Virginia, the state that famously decommissioned its terrifyingly hackable voting machines last year, the startup Follow My Vote believes the solution to safeguard against vote rigging isn’t to revert to no or low-tech, but through the adoption of blockchain technology.

Aside from the obvious issue of scale, Follow My Vote’s cofounder and CTO Nathan Hourt considers paper-based voting systems precariously reliant on the procedural security of officials conducting their jobs correctly and honestly. In offline systems, “there is no way to detect a breach of security… no way to determine if all of the original ballots are still present, if any extra ballots have been added, or if any ballots have been tampered with,” Hourt argues. The risks are amplified in national elections. “The more voters a paper-based system attempts to accommodate, the easier it becomes for a fraudster to corrupt.”

Envisioning a future for e-voting

Follow My Vote aims to combat electoral fraud and protect user credentials by developing a convenient and secure end-to-end voting system that is also open-source and auditable. In their model, voters would skip the lines to cast votes online from home using a webcam and government-issued ID. The virtual electorate could then theoretically watch the election in real-time entrusting the veracity of results to the underlying blockchain auditability features.

How can a voting platform that touts transparency also be secure? Cryptography protects each ballot against tampering from end to end, keeping votes anonymous and immutable though tamper-evident on the blockchain ledger. Each voter can change his or her vote at any time during the election using a private key and unique voter ID.

Dr. Feng Hao co-lead of the Secure & Resilient Systems group at Newcastle University’s School of Computing Science argues that “end to end verifiable voting systems have the merit of allowing a voter to verify if their vote is correctly recorded and correctly included into the tallying process—and if ballots are missing in transit or modified, it can be detected by voters.”

Read the rest of the article on Forbes. 

Learn more about blockchain voting.

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

The post Follow My Vote Featured On Forbes For Blockchain Voting 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.

 This seminar was presented to the Computer Science Department at Harding University, but it is targeted to a fairly general audience. No prior education on blockchains or computer science is necessary to understand this presentation.

The bulk of Nathan’s presentation covered the purpose and value of blockchain technology. His blockchain speech takes a deep dive into why the blockchain matters and making the inner workings understandable to the average layman. Some of the topics he covers include:

• Blockchain transaction histories.
• Consensus protocols (How blockchains come to agreements and verify transactions)
  • Proof of work (as exemplified by Bitcoin)
  • Proof of stake (as exemplified by BitShares) 
• Blockchain use cases 
  • Voting (Follow My Vote)
    • Proxy voting
    • Verified polling
    • Political elections
  • Currency (Bitcoin, BitShares)
  • Music (Muse now SOUNDAC)
  • Social Media (Steemit)

Additionally, Nathan discussed some of his background and recent endeavors such as BitShares in 2014, being 1 of only 2 chief architects for the BitShares 2.0 MIT-licensed Graphene blockchain framework, and his migration to Follow My Vote and building open-source end to end verifiable blockchain voting software.

See additional pictures in our Facebook Album!

About Nathan Hourt, Co-Founder & CTO of Follow My Vote

Nathan Hourt has a Master’s of Science Degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as well as a Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Computer Science from Harding University. While attending college, Nathan contributed to research projects in data compression, randomized algorithms, and software obfuscation and reverse engineering. Nathan also collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory on the development of a next-generation computer networking protocol.

Nathan has over 5 years of experience developing cross-platform software, running the gamut from kernel- level C to Javascript and GUI. Nathan is an accomplished blockchain architect, owning critical role in the design and development of the Graphene Toolkit for BitShares, a leading crypto-currency that has been credited with several industry innovations.

Join Nathan

Nathan is currently leading the Follow My Vote Code Contributor Program. As an open source project, Follow My Vote encourages people to contribute.  You can work directly with Nathan to help build the voting software of the future.

Developers who contribute code to Follow My Vote by resolving issues that live in our github repository will be rewarded in MERITs. As a holder of MERIT, you will help set the direction of Follow My Vote’s software development. When Follow My Vote is deciding what features to add next, or which direction to take with their products, we will run stake-weighted polls in our software to prioritize development based on market demand. These polls will be weighted in MERIT.

Becoming a Follow My Vote Contributor is the first step to becoming an official team member. When we expand our team, we will look to hire first from our list of contributors.

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote. He encourages you to share Nathan’s blockchain speech so that more people can understand this revolutionary technology.

The post Follow My Vote CTO, Nathan Hourt, Gives Blockchain Speech At Harding University appeared first on Follow My Vote.