– 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.

“To us, part of fixing the process means the ability to independently audit an election. Without transparency, there is absolutely no definitive way that people can verify that their votes have been accurately recorded and stored, and that the results of the election have not been tampered with.” – Adam Ernest, CEO

Those who count the votes in an election are the ones who hold the power. At Follow My Vote, we are offering a decentralized election solution with transparent and mathematically proven results. Anyone who is curious to see the numbers, can and should be able to verify them. Lest we end up with another legal battle, like that in Kansas, just to see voting machine tapes.

How are we offering this secure e-voting technology? Well, look no further than blockchain technology and elliptic curve cryptography.

“We’re using this technology to allow people to audit not only their own vote, but an entire election. It’s very powerful for voters to be able to follow their vote and engage in the political process from anywhere using any device. Many people are dissatisfied with the political environment, and our software will help to increase voter turnout, especially among the younger generations.” – Adam Ernest, CEO

For anyone who reads our blog and knows what we are attempting to do, you know that we face an uphill battle. We love to see our voting technology in the press, as it shines more light on our message. To those who are on board with our voting revolution, we ask for your continued support. There are still many folks that say online voting will never be secure. To the naysayers, we ask – why not give it a try first? In 2016, Follow My Vote will be hosting a parallel presidential election. Together, let’s show the world that decentralized, verifiable e-voting is finally here to stay.

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 Voting Technology In the Press: Follow My Vote Featured on IVN appeared first on Follow My Vote.

In reality this is an industry that is in dire need of innovation. To have a successful democracy and a government that works for the people, voters need to be engaged. There have been all sorts of different ideas about increasing voter turnout but the fact remains that voters still need to show up to a physical polling location and cast a ballot into a black box.  You are told that your vote counted but you cannot prove it. At Follow My Vote we believe that voters will be more engaged if they can prove that their voice was heard and that their vote was counted.

The UK is taking a step in the right direction. Earlier this year the speaker of the House of Commons called for a secure online voting system by 2020.

But what about all the online voting cases that failed? Didn’t we learn that online voting can’t be done?

It is rare that one becomes successful with out learning from failure.

To be successful we must have verifiable online voting. This is not an easy task. A verifiable online voting system must be transparent so that each voter can check that their vote was cast correctly and actually was counted as cast. The real trick is balancing transparency with anonymity. We must retain the secrecy of the ballot. Otherwise voter coercion can occur. Verifiable online voting makes this feasible.

Follow My vote is using a revolutionary technology to bring innovation to voting and to make verifiable online voting possible. We are developing the voting platform of the future where any voter can verify that their vote was counted, while remaining anonymous to other voters. Don’t worry we also use the service of 3rd party verifiers to verify identities of voters.

Any online voting system has to arrive at its conclusion in such a way that voters and observers can verify the count, independently of the software used – this is called end-to-end verifiability. This way voters can be assured that their votes were recorded as they were cast, and that all cast votes were counted correctly.

The vital nature of this can be explained by analogy to online banking. Bank customers can verify their own bank statements – and need not care about the software that produced them. But what if the banks provided no evidence of your transactions, just your remaining balance – how could you verify that the bank wasn’t cheating you?

The difficulty in respect of online voting is that how each voter cast their vote must be kept secret – we can’t just have a huge banking-like “statement” recording who voted which way. Instead, all the votes cast are gathered together and presented on a website in encrypted form, in order to ensure ballot secrecy.

The challenge is to design a way of using encryption that allows an independently-verifiable tallying of individual votes, without removing the secrecy it affords the ballots. Methods have been invented that allow the voting server to generate cryptographically-sound proofs that its count is correct. This means voters, observers and media organizations can perform the necessary checks to establish that the declared outcome really does match the votes cast in the elections.

Source: The Conversation

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote. He enjoys writing about verifiable online voting, as it is the only way online voting can become a reality.

The post The Only Way Is Verifiable Online Voting appeared first on Follow My Vote.