Our first stop was at the Montgomery County Government Center in Christiansburg, VA. This is where Mr. Wertz’s office is located. From his office, he can monitor any potential issues that may arise throughout the day. An issue that appeared right off the bat was a lock on some of the electronic voter logs at various precincts. These books of registered voters are kept electronically and stored on laptops that officials use to check people in to receive their ballot. No one seemed to understand why the program was locking them out of the system, but the best solution was to just keep restarting the computer. This was not a deafening blow, as was the case in Roanoke, VA, because Montgomery County keeps a paper form of voter logs just in case. This issue persisted throughout the day, and each of the precincts we visited had at least one laptop that had software issues.

According to Mr. Wertz, there are more ballot options in Montgomery County than in Chesterfield, VA, a county three times its size, making it “a nightmare” for officials to sort out.

The Christiansburg Recreation Center was the first and busiest precinct we visited. Voters must show valid identification to receive their card to inform officials what ballot to give them. Due to how Montgomery County’s voting districts are drawn, there are 30 different ballots one can receive. According to Mr. Wertz, there are more ballot options in Montgomery County than in Chesterfield, VA, a county three times its size, making it “a nightmare” for officials to sort out. Once the voter has received their ballot, they must fill in an optical scan ballot. Once they are satisfied with their choices, the ballot is placed in a machine to be counted. There are two ways that a vote would be rejected. The first is if none of the bubbles are filled in. The second is if a voter has voted for two or more candidates running for the same office. However, it only takes one bubble to be filled in on a ballot with multiple races for it to be accepted. For example, if a person were to correctly fill out a bubble for a sheriff’s race, but incorrectly for a state senate race, the ballot would be accepted under the assumption that the person had no preference when voting for the state senator.

The final issue found throughout the day was would-be-voters being turned away from the precincts for a number of reasons. The two most common reasons were an incorrect address given when signing in and people arriving at the wrong precinct to vote.

All of these issues were reoccurring themes at each of the precincts visited. At Follow My Vote, we believe that we have the solution to dealing with registration issues that eliminate the reliance on shaky, outdated software. With honest and verifiable e-voting, you eliminate the potential of ballots being miscast. By not dealing with crowds at the precincts, voters gain ease of access by voting online. You would also increase voter turnout by not making citizens choose between work or the polls. We want to thank all of the Montgomery County officials for answering our questions and allowing us access throughout the day. If you believe that citizens deserve a smart, verifiable, and transparent election process, then the Follow My Vote team asks that you join our list of supporters.

For more information on Virginia elections visit: Virginia Department of Elections

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 What We Learned At The 2015 Montgomery County General Election 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.

At its most fundamental core, the ultimate goal of any true democracy is to best represent the will of the people. And it is of absolutely paramount importance to note that the democracy should not only represent the will of some people from a particular demographic or sub-set of the population; the democratic process should account for the views, opinions and desires of as many eligible citizens as possible.

And while this may sound like such an obvious truth, there has been a growing problem with voter apathy and dwindling voter turnout in many democracies all around the globe. This is all while so many other nations are desperately fighting for the opportunity to elect their own governments in a fair and transparent manner. For some, the reason why they choose not to vote is that they are not engaged with the political process, disenchanted with apathy and corruption. They do not feel that the political process is relevant to their everyday lives.

In the “Viral Voting” report issued by WebRoots Democracy, many of these issues are explored in the context of the United Kingdom, but they can be just as applicable in many other places around the globe. In particular, the report takes a look at the youth vote and what it will take to encourage more young people to visit the polls. This is not a new topic and it has been stated many times before that the future of democracy should embrace e-voting technology.

In the WebRoots report, Head of Citizenship and Political Participation Programme at Demos Jonathan Birdwell indicates that only 44% of those aged 18 to 24 voted in the 2010 election, while 74% of those over 55 voted. This gap is incredibly significant. It’s not that young people don’t care about the future of their respective countries. They may not be voting in the same proportion as older generations, but many are actively poltical in more informal ways. The challenge is engaging this demographic so that the voting process can once again be relevant to them.

Read more here.

The post Voter Apathy At All Time High 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.

Recently there were comments made by Gov. Rick Scott and his administration in an attempt to stymie what will surely be a huge step forward for the digital democracy. We will continue to watch Florida closely!

The Scott administration’s behind-the-scenes opposition has opened a new rift between Scott’s office and county supervisors and stirred new speculation that Scott may not want to take steps that would expand the pool of voters as he explores a possible U.S. Senate bid in 2018.

Florida would become the 25th state with an online voter registration program under a bill (SB 228) sponsored by Sen. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth. The idea has broad bipartisan support as well as the backing of AARP, the League of Women Voters and Disability Rights of Florida, and it unanimously passed a Senate committee Thursday.

But a staff report of the bill by Scott’s Division of Elections refers to the bill as a “mandate (that) presents potential risks and challenges” at a time when the state’s voter registration and driver license databases are both undergoing extensive changes. Florida relies on driver license information to verify voters’ identities.

The report says: “Malicious cyber-attacks and non-malicious malfunctions could potentially wreak havoc on an online voter registration system” and online registrations “could potentially increase the chances of votes being cast by someone other than the people actually registered to vote.”

Read Full Article Here.

The post Negative Comments Surrounding Florida’s Online Voter Registration Stir Officials appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Number 4: The Spoiler Effect

Anyone awake during the 2000 U.S. presidential election is aware of the spoiler effect. In that election, we had a candidate that didn’t win (Nader) who divided another candidate’s support (Gore). Without Nader’s presence, Gore would have won; but with Nader present, Bush won. It makes no sense for a candidate to enter the race—and lose!—yet change the winner. But that’s the kind of nonsense plurality carries out.

Plurality voting is extremely sensitive to the spoiler effect. The “spoiler” candidate only needs to take away a little support from a similar candidate to sway the election. This happens because plurality only lets you choose one candidate. Because you can only pick one, voters are forced to divide their support among similar candidates.

The spoiler effect influences policy as well. It largely explains the U.S.’s draconian ballot access laws. Third parties and independents are often forced to quickly get many thousands — sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands — of signatures to get on the ballot.

To make matters worse, major parties then challenge those signatures to try to kick them off the ballot. In Pennsylvania, presidential candidate Ralph Nader was forced to pay court costs just for defending his own signatures. This heinousness plays out on the local level, too.

Why do major parties do this? Without a third or fourth candidate on the ballot, there’s no worry of a spoiler. Of course that also means voters don’t get options, but that’s not the major parties’ problem. So far, major parties have preferred to stifle competition and democratic speech than address the real culprit: plurality voting.

Read Full Article Here

The post Why Does Plurality Voting Fail? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Folks, we are presenting this piece to you as we stand on the forefront of a potential breakthrough. If you’ve happened to view the news in the last few days, you may have noticed that humanity has landed a probe on Comet 67P, discovered how to use the Internet to produce telepathy, and (per a Scottish distillery) recently returned a batch of whiskey that remained on the International Space Stations for three years. Put shortly, we’ve been making huge strides in technological advancement here recently. In just under two weeks, the world will get its first glance at another new piece of technology. Is it as revolutionary as some of the other items just mentioned? Well depending on your definition of “revolutionary”, then maybe or maybe not; but it has the potential to change the face of democracy as we know it. While that may sound a tad hyperbolic, consider this for a second. What if we told you that on December 11th, in Sacramento, California, people would get their first true look at a new voting platform that is completely open source, transparent, and secure? Now we’ve got a big deal on our hands.

The post The Road To California, Part One appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Your vote is your voice. If you choose not to vote, you are choosing to exercise your right to remain silent. But, if you choose to remain silent, how can you expect to get what you want out of life?

Our elected officials are not mind-readers with supernatural abilities, they are everyday people like you and me. Even so, the reality is that our lawmakers ultimately get to make the decisions about what legislation is drafted into bills and written into law.

So, if you are opposed to the idea of letting other people make your decisions for you, REGISTER TO VOTE and let your voice be heard by voting with every chance you get!

The post Are You Registered? appeared first on Follow My Vote.