“San Francisco is due for a new voting system. For years, we have relied on private vendor contracts with expensive licensing fees for software that is highly secretive. Instead of taking on another one of these “black box” contracts, San Francisco has an opportunity to lead the country and develop our own fully transparent voting system.”

Digital Paper Trail

The authors suggest, “It would be a paper-ballot system using open-source software running on commercial, off-the-shelf hardware.” Follow My Vote already uses open-source code. This is fundamental to having an end-to-end verifiable election. If people cannot view the code being used, voter privacy and security could be compromised. Further, San Francisco would not need to buy any commercial hardware. Since we are 100 percent online, voters can use their current devices. This would result in cost-savings for the city.

Costs

“San Francisco’s process for upgrading its voting machines has always been to purchase a proprietary system from one of a few voting machine companies.”

“Each year, we have to pay high licensing fees for software that is both outdated and completely secret.”

Elections cost money. There will never be a way to completely eliminate all costs. However, we can increase efficiency through the use of online voting. In a study we did at Follow My Vote, states are spending roughly $5 per ballot. There would be no more need for IT maintenance and scrapping for used parts when voting machines fail. Cost savings abound when we switch to online voting.

Transparency

The authors say they do not want to deal with any more “black box” contracts. Since we use blockchain technology, voters casts their vote which is stored on the blockchain. He or she can then audit their own ballot and all others. For more information, view the infographic below and visit our blockchain voting page.

Eco-Friendly

It is no surprise that conducting elections on paper, where millions participate, can have severe environmental impacts. In the U.S., roughly 126 million American voted in 2012. Many states even require that a paper ballot be printed for every registered voter. This leaves millions of unused ballots wasted.

Rough estimates indicate:

• 1,185 tons of wood used
• 10,950,000 gallons of water consumed
• 17,250 million BTUs of energy used
• 981,800 pounds of solid waste produced

If San Francisco really wants to take a stand for the environment, they should switch to online voting where electricity is already being used anyway.

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 San Francisco Ready for Voting Upgrade appeared first on Follow My Vote.

For a brief period in November 2000, it looked as if the future of the United States was going to be decided by chads—hanging door chads, swinging door chads, perforated chads, and yes, even the occasional dimpled chad.

When the electoral contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to only a few hundred votes in the state of Florida, all anyone could talk about were the tiny perforated circles on election ballots voters pushed to indicate their selections.

The entire thing was, unquestionably, an epic mess—the voting system of the most technologically advanced country on the planet melting down for all the world to see. It was a wake-up call that the U.S. needed to take drastic measures to transform the way people voted in the 21st century.

This newfound focus on improving the country’s elections didn’t just extend to looking for more reliable balloting machines. With an increasing number of people using the Internet on a daily basis, the 2000 election sparked an interest in developing technologies that would let people vote online with their own personal computers in the comfort of their own homes.

If implemented correctly, the proliferation of online voting could solve one of the biggest problems in American democracy: low voter turnout. The 2014 midterms boasted the lowest voter turnout in 72 years. In the three most populous states in the country, less than one-third of voters submitted ballots. For off-year and primary elections, the percentage of Americans who go to the polls is even lower. During Texas’s primary election in March of last year, only one out of every 10 registered voters bothered to show up.

Low turnout leads to political polarization because the most ideologically extreme voters on either side are the most likely to participate. When politicians know they’re mainly accountable to rigid partisans, the country gets politicians more interested in shutting down the government to win political points than making compromises in good faith. Making it easier to vote by moving the action from a polling station to your pocket could only increase turnout, especially in the primaries.

Yet 15 years after the 2000 debacle, online voting in the United States has barely advanced.

The state of Alaska’s Department of Elections set up an online voting system, but no one else has replicated it. A program backed by the Department of Defense to enable online voting for Americans living overseas was scrapped in 2004, eight months before it was scheduled for deployment, due to security concerns.

Making online voting work is infinitely harder than it initially seems. However, in the past few years, there’s been a renewed effort to solve the conundrum of online voting using a most unexpected tool: Bitcoin.

Source: kernelmag.dailydot.com

The post The Proof is in the Blockchain! appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Learn how you can become a part of the push to digitize our nations voting platform and bring about the Digital Democracy through education and advocacy!

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) serves as an international nexus of trust, protecting and promoting open source software as well as the communities that develop and depend on it. Primarily known for our work in certifying open source software licenses, the OSI’s work today has grown—just as open source has—to include a variety of member-driven working groups and incubator projects that help practitioners and communities create and share resources, furthering the open source movement. For 17 years, the OSI has brought together open source developers, organizers, contributors, advocates, and businesses toward the common goal of creation through collaboration. Our membership campaign is dedicated to furthering this vision.

Our goal is to sign up 2,398 new individual members in celebration of the organization’s founding on 2/3/98. The “2,398 for 2/3/98” membership drive will also run in parallel with the OSI’s annual board elections, which started with nominations opening February 2 and runs through April 1, when the new board directors take their seats. The membership campaign will become an annual event.

Why join?

Membership provides several benefits to individuals, the OSI, and the open source software community. In addition to standard member benefits such as free and discounted books, magazines, conference registrations, and other learning and training materials, as a member-driven organization OSI individual members can vote for OSI board directors and even run for a seat.

In addition to governance, individual members are invited to join or create OSI-sponsored working groups and incubator projects in various areas of open source advocacy and adoption. These working groups and projects serve as resources for the entire open source community.

Read More Here: https://opensource.com/life/15/2/defending-open-source-join-osi-today

The post What is the Open Source Initiative (OSI)? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

While Bitcoin has received the lion’s share of attention since its conception, recently the Blockchain — the distributed public database used to record Bitcoin transactions — has just begun entering the spotlight for enabling some important capabilities outside of Bitcoin.

“It’s my belief that Blockchain technology will be as important to the world as Gutenburg’s printing press,” Nic Cary, cofounder of Blockchain.info, told me recently. “For the first time in the history of the world we can reimagine how the world transacts without relying on an intermediary.”

One way the Blockchain might change the world is through Distributed Cloud Storage.

Distributed Cloud Storage

The Blockchain has already been manipulated to store information in unscaleable ways. A niche storage trick is sending small amounts of Bitcoin to addresses that represent information when converted into a Unicode format. For example, the above image of Nelson Mandela is recorded in this transaction.

Besides being a hobby for techies, Blockchain data storage could be disruptive. Current cloud storage services are centralized — thus users must place trust in a single storage provider. With the Blockchain, this can become decentralized. For instance, Storj is beta-testing cloud storage using a Blockchain-powered network to improve security and decrease dependency. Additionally users can rent out their excess storage capacity, Airbnb-style, creating new marketplaces.

Read More Here: venturebeat.com

The post How BlockChain Technology will Change the World appeared first on Follow My Vote.

January 2015 saw the celebration of Democracy Day here in the UK, this year marking the 750th anniversary of the country’s first parliament, although it’s perhaps not an occasion up there with Christmas. The month also saw anti-austerity party Syriza win a majority in Greece’s parliament, on the promise of a renegotiation of public debt obligations that many believe are crippling the country’s economic recovery. It was quite the month for democracy, even if it passed many in the politically disengaged British public by.

The UK will be holding its own public vote in May, with some billing it the ‘lottery election’ because of the colourful range of parties that are in a real position to win seats this time. The Independent has narrowed the race down to just 100 key marginals, noting that Labour is likely to face fierce competition from the Scottish National Party, and the Lib Dems are in danger of dropping from a haul of 57 seats last time around to just 19 in 2015.

Just as the political race has been thrown a little more wide open, the digital world has come a long way since we voted back in 2010, and no doubt contributing to the loosening grip of the ‘big two’ parties. But, despite near-peak-smartphone penetration in the UK, policymakers are still yet to give the green light to online, or better yet, mobile voting.

Internet voting
In true, lumbering bureaucracy fashion, two different groups in parliament have been consulting simultaneously on proposals around a ‘digital democracy’. Speaker John Bercow’s Digital Democracy Commission has just produced its report, stating that internet voting could be online in time for the 2020 general election, while also noting that parliamentary language and procedures will need to be simplified by then if we have any hope that “everyone can understand what the House of Commons does”.

Read More Here: http://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/digital-democracy-feature-2015-election#HXkbtkpyyoiK12A5.99/

The post The UK To Hear Proposals Concerning a Digital Democracy appeared first on Follow My Vote.

The post The Pros and Cons of Online Voting appeared first on Follow My Vote.

None of these scenarios come even close, though, to being the oddest occurrences in the game. In fact, there have been some problems with online and electronic voting that have just left people flabbergasted. There was the situation that just occurred very recently in Canada, with an entire set of municipal elections stalled due to human error resulting in the misnaming of the files that stored the votes. While it is certainly understandable that human error may occur at any time, for it to happen in a situation as important as this just shows how fragile the system truly happens to be. Or there’s the situation that occurred in Denmark in 2006, where using a process known as Van Eck Phreaking forced officials to ban electronic voting for the time being. This process happens when radio emissions from the voting machine’s monitor are captured, then able to be replicated, to some extent, on a remote monitor. Wij vertrouwen stemcomputersniet” (“We don’t trust voting computers”) was the group that carried out the experiments, and were able to convince voting officials that electronic voting machines simply were not up to the task. Bringing it back to the United States, there were multiple scenarios in the midterm election where, due to “calibration” issues, voters would select a candidate, only to have another candidate chosen.

So as you may be able to ascertain, the online voting game, to this point, has had it’s fair shares of ups, but an oppressive amount of downs. Unfortunately the attitude that has arisen out of these failures isn’t one of, “What can we do to fix these issues and move forward,” but instead a feeling of defeat. There are many among the public who believe that there is just no way, in today’s world, that secure and transparent online voting can exist. Take for example, the word of Ron Rivest, an MIT computer scientist and early pioneer of current cryptography. He, for one, believes that if the resources are available to maintain such secure and transparent results, then they shouldn’t be wasted on voting. Instead, they should be used for the Department of Defense, or the financial industry. Of course, he is correct, to an extent. The cryptographic technology used to aid Follow My Vote’s systems could have ramifications for a variety of fields, true. However, we feel that the timing is appropriate to assist with the voting industry because at the end of the day, this is what the foundation of our country is built on, the ability to choose those who represent us. Also, it is disappointing to see a gentleman, whose entire career is based on forward-thinking be so willing to completely dismiss the idea. Suffice it to say, perhaps he just isn’t willing to think outside of the box on this issue, or he just doesn’t hold voting in as high regard as, well, money or war.

However, we aren’t going to let this negativity slow down what we are trying to achieve. We do, in fact, believe that secure online voting can be done, and in the next post, we’re going to give you some insight into what exactly is allowing us the opportunity to prove ourselves.

~ Brice Moon ~

The post The Road to California – Part Four appeared first on Follow My Vote.