Predicting Our Future is a new podcast about the next revolutions in technology. 

Ernest appeared on EPISODE 9: DISINTERESTED VOTERS & 500,000 ELECTED OFFICIALS.

Listen to the whole episode or skip to 20:15 to hear Ernest explain and discuss using blockchain technology to build open source, end-to-end verifiable voting software:

“In the United States, there are over 500,000 elected officials. In the overwhelming majority of elections, less than half of eligible voters participate, resulting in one of the lowest levels of voter engagement of any Western democracy. In this episode, Andrews asks and tries to answer: What can be done to increase turnout for elections conducted every year in the U.S.? Can the security risks of implementing online voting be overcome? If online voting did become available in the United States, what might it look like? Which companies would be the winners?”

Episode 9 is one of three different episodes covering the issues facing the future of elections. Check them out on predictingourfuture.com:

Episode 7: Can Online Voting Defeat The Broken Electoral College?
Episode 8: Hacking Elections, DDoS Attacks, & Online Voting Around the World
Episode 9: Disinterested Voters & 500,000 Elected Officials

Learn about Follow My Vote’s blockchain voting software.

About the Author: Will Long is the Co-Founder & Marketing Manager of Folow My Vote. 

The post Follow My Vote CEO Discusses Online Voting On Predicting Our Future Podcast appeared first on Follow My Vote.

With all the technology we have these days, it is truly amazing that there has been little to no innovation in the voting scene, UNTIL NOW! Here is a piece of what Nelson wrote about Follow My Vote and blockchain voting:

Blockchain could be adapted for elections to allow early voting from smartphones; allow second-by-second, public audit transparency of the ballot; allow you to change your vote right up to the poll close; and provide instant results right then and there.

Follow My Vote is a blockchain-based voting software solution that promises to revolutionize elections.

It works along the same principals as Bitcoin, where an encrypted ledger is distributed using computer power. That open-source, secure, peer-to-peer asset maintenance and payment system could be mimicked for numerous other purposes, many say.

That includes banking, distributed patient medical data, real estate transactions and elections. I wrote about a private blockchain operating system recently that promises to fix banking software problems.

Follow My Vote says its system, as with other blockchains, removes vulnerabilities. Fraud, external influence such as intimidation, miscounting and other shenanigans are eliminated.

Plus, voting would join the 21st century à la social media. The individual’s actual vote, not just his post-vote tweet or polling station’s exit poll, becomes an element in play on election day.

Transparency is a benefit, too, the organization says of yet-to-be adopted software.

After Nelson discussed Follow My Vote, he went on to explain how blockchain technology works. The explanation is short and to the point.

Roughly, blockchain works by securely managing a database via network nodes that all maintain a copy of the ledger. It’s supposedly impossible to scam because each node has a copy of the database, and the pending transactions, added in a block, are determined as valid through hash markings.

Head over to Network World to read the rest of the article.

If you are interested in learning more about how blockchains work, watch Follow My Vote CTO, Nathan Hourt, break it down in this video.

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

The post Network World Talks Follow My Vote & Blockchains appeared first on Follow My Vote.

“The experts in the Wired article [that said online voting had many security flaws], and most of the others, might have computer security backgrounds, but they have never done even one election.

[The 2000 effort in Arizona] was a global event; everybody knew about this. We had something like 80 million people come to the website on the day of election. And one firm even hired hackers to break the site. It’s true the first few hours, the servers were very slow. With the help of Cisco, we learned how to defend [against] all those attacks, and response time normalized. And we sustained all the challenges and everything else.

The reality is it is doable, especially with new technology.”

Online voting could allow practically everyone to vote although it may take time to adopt the technology. In the article, Joe Mohen outlines the benefits of having everyone voting and why they haven’t adopted it.

“If you had Internet voting, almost everybody would vote. The way it is now, incumbents get elected at an 80 percent, 90 percent rate; if your congressman’s been there awhile, your congressman’s going to be there awhile. If you allow Internet voting, incumbents would get voted out at a 50/50 rate. So the science of staying in as an incumbent is to manage the voting systems so that the predictable few vote in the primary.”

About Follow My Vote

At Follow My Vote, we are dedicated to making a secure online voting platform that will be able to allow everyone that can vote to vote. With a 19% congressional approval rating, voting out incumbents can be a huge step in order to restoring trust and satisfaction in our government.

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

The post Joe Mohen, CEO of election.com, “Internet voting creates higher voter turnout” appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Ernest will join Frank Atwood of Approval voting, Nate Kaplan of SeePolitical, and Kimberley J Abels of HeadCount.

Topics to be discussed include ballot access, online voting, initiatives, registering to vote and alternative voting methods.

Christina Tobin, Founder of the The Free and Equal Elections Foundation, will moderate the Politicon panel with Jahi from the Hip Hop band PE 2.0 The Next Generation of Public Enemy.

Exhibiting In Politicon’s Democracy Village

Follow My Vote will have a booth in the Democracy Village at Politicon. We will be informing attendees on the ways Follow My Vote is advancing and reforming voting around the world. Additionally we will be educating people about blockchain technology and how our end-to-end verifiable voting software works.

We are also excited to tell people about our parallel election. To fund this demonstration of our platform we are running a Kickstarter. If you support honest elections and believe our voting systems should modernized, please donate.

One of Follow My Vote’s partners, The Free and Equal Elections Foundation, will also be joining us in the Democracy village. Free and Equal will be talking with attendees about their mission to broaden electoral choices through education. The foundation will also be distributing products from their sponsors: Dr. Bronner’s, Marley Coffee, TeaZen , Hearthstone Estate and others.

Democracy Village encompasses a multitude of organizations, vendors, and digital platforms that span both sides of the political spectrum on a variety of issues. Located in the Pasadena Convention Center’s Exhibit Halls A & B, Democracy Village will allow exhibitors the opportunity to promote their business or organization, create displays, and interact with attendees. Last year’s participants included: Rock the Vote, LA County Bicycle Coalition, KRLA, and many more exciting organizations.

What Is Politicon?

Politicon is being called “the unconventional political convention”. The event will take place in Pasadena, California at the Pasadena Convention Center over June 25th and 26th.

Attendees will enjoy a  full weekend of panels, debates, TV and movie screenings, art, podcasts, comedy shows, Q&A’s, book readings, interviews, meet & greets, art exhibitions, and music performances.

Like Follow My Vote, Politicon is a non-partisan organization. The convention is not affiliated with any political organizations, parties or PACS.

Buy Tickets 

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

The post CEO, Adam Ernest, To Participate In Politicon Panel 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.

The post Paper Ballots and Current Voting Systems are not Secure nor Feasible appeared first on Follow My Vote.

First, Utah is a closed caucus. This essentially means that you must be a registered party member to participate. The company contracted to establish the blockchain voting system for Utah’s GOP was Smartmatic. Strangely, we could not find a single mention or explanation of blockchain technology on Smartmatic’s website.

“Smartmatic will use a private blockchain along with end-to-end encryption, enabling registered Republicans in Utah to cast their vote online.”

– Samburaj Das, CCN.LA

With the Utah GOP using a closed caucus, does this mean that only Republican voters can audit their own vote? A WIRED article mentions that Smartmatic did create a bulletin board for each voter to verify that their vote was cast correctly…

It is a step in the right direction, but what about being able to audit the entire election?  If you wanted to independently audit the election results, Republican or not, would you have been able to do so yesterday, or even today for that matter? These are fundamental questions that need to be answered.

Adding insult to injury, it appears that online voters in Utah experienced multiple problems yesterday. Utah voters actually reached out to Follow My Vote yesterday for help with casting their vote. However, since we are not providing them with voting services, we were unable to help. Multiple outlets are reporting that many voters experienced error messages when casting their ballot, while some could not even verify their ID.

“As of Tuesday night, party officials said about 10,000 of the 40,000 Utahns who applied to vote online were rejected because their IDs couldn’t be verified.”

– Amber Phillips, Washington Post 

To ensure true transparency yesterday, Follow My Vote would have made sure that all of the code was open source.  To make things completely transparent, we would also have allowed anyone to audit the entire blockchain-based ballot box, while keeping each vote anonymous. By allowing complete transparency and end-to-end verifiability, there would be little left to question about election results.

Democratic Party

The Democratic Party had 128 delegates up for grabs in Arizona, Idaho and Utah yesterday. Arizona was a primary, while Utah and Idaho were caucuses. Bernie Sanders actually had the better night, with convincing victories over Hilary Clinton in Idaho and Utah. He carried around 80 percent of the vote in both states and collected 67 new delegates. Sanders’ total increased to 937, which still leaves him with quite a bit of work to do if he is to catch up to Clinton. However, more of these convincing victories are what he will need going forward.

Clinton won the Arizona primary and collected 51 new delegates. This puts her total at 1,681 and her lead seems as steady as it was before Tuesday’s results.

Next up: Democrats have 3 caucuses in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii on March 26th.

Republican Party

Republicans had the Arizona Primary and Utah Caucus last night. 98 new delegates were up for grabs. Donald Trump was heavily favored to win Arizona, and met those expectations taking 47 percent of the vote. Trump’s delegate total increased by 58, putting him at 739. Ted Cruz won Utah with 69 percent of the vote and took 40 new delegates. Cruz’s total sits at 465. John Kasich collected no new delegates. His delegate total sits at 143. Much like Clinton, this continues to be Trump’s race to lose.

Next up: Republicans have the Wisconsin primary on April 5th.

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 Blockchain Voting in Utah? Pics or it Didn’t Happen appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Voting Laws & Requirements

Source: The U.S. Vote Foundation

The post Confused On How To Vote In Your State? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

The post Google Tries Their Own Voting System: A Liquid Democracy Experiment appeared first on Follow My Vote.

– Democracy For America Endorsement Poll

DFA chose to open the polls to everyone, because they want as much grass roots activity as possible. While this group favors Democratic candidates, Follow My Vote is more interested with the group’s trust in an online voting system.

“While the group will send the ballot to all members, anyone is allowed to vote online between Dec. 7 and Dec. 15, with the group allowing one vote per valid email address.”

However, the Follow My Vote team has already pointed out key areas that can be legitimized in their system. As we see it, the DFA’s endorsement poll security can be described as, “Please don’t.” What we mean by this, is that the group is counting on no one to interfere with the poll. How can someone interfere, you ask? Well, it appears that the only prerequisite to participating is giving a unique email address. Anyone can produce multiple unique emails to have their vote counted more than once. A novel, grassroots concept could easily turn into ballot stuffing for an endorsement that does not reflect the popular vote.

The Follow My Vote team is offering a secure and verifiable online voting system to any business or organization that would like to conduct a poll such as DFA’s. We value words like grassroots, popular vote, and accuracy. The idea of a grassroots, popular vote is what we are all about at FMV, and we would be more than happy to collaborate with any interested parties.

For more information on how our technology works visit: What is Blockchain Technology?

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 Online Voting Progress? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

There are actually several differences between countries in the EU in regards to the European Parliament elections. The European Parliament has stated that these “undermine the notion of European citizenship and the principle of equality.”

The reforms to the electoral act propose that all EU citizens living abroad should be able to vote in European Parliament elections in several unique ways. These include electronic, online and postal methods.

Both the US and UK have seen poor voter turnouts recently.  The UK experienced a 36% turnout for last year’s European Parliament elections, even though there was a high level of hype, media coverage, and money involved.

A poll this year, by WebRoots Democracy and YouGov, found that 56% of the British public who are online want an online voting option implemented for the upcoming referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.

The European Council  will now review the proposed reforms to the 1976 EU Electoral Act. Ultimately, the European Council must unanimously endorse the reforms before being approved by all member states.

We applaud the efforts here to promote online voting, however the voting systems used must be safe, secure, and honest. Read about online voting technology.

Source: WebRoots Democracy

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

The post EU Citizens Abroad Must Be Able To Vote Online Declares European Parliament. appeared first on Follow My Vote.