Maybe we simply don’t have enough reasons to vote.  Luckily, the Independent Voter Network has prepared a list of 50 reasons why you should vote.  Here are our ten favorite:

1. To honor Founding Father Benjamin Franklin’s challenge to us all.

Following the close of the Constitutional Convention, he was asked “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” He answered, “A republic, if you can keep it!”

2. So you can complain with integrity.

“Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the people and burn their behinds, then they will have to sit on their blisters.” – Abraham Lincoln

3. Because “Taxation without representation is tyranny.” – James Otis

4. For the anticipation of seeing who wins!

5. For the 38,159 missing in action, awaiting a return home to their nation of equality, justice, and freedom.

6. Because you have researched your candidates and can make an informed vote

7. If you don’t vote for your own interests, who will?

8. Because “Apathy gets you the government we have today.” – Gil Sery

9. “You can vote for yourself, or someone you really like.” – Dillon McHugh

10. “Because the rest of us are depending on you.” – Marv DeBoy

If you need even more reasons to vote, check out the full list here. 

The truth is democracy can’t function if almost half of citizens aren’t voting; and, in this regard, Follow My Vote is striving to restore the democratic tradition.  Sign up to support Follow My Vote  in our push for secure end-to-end verifiable mobile voting in the United States.

And please, don’t disappoint Benjamin Franklin.  Exercise your right to vote!

About the author: Jess Kersey is Follow My Vote’s Data Scientist.  Her personal reason to vote is no. 2 on this list – so she can complain with integrity!

The post 10 Reasons To Vote appeared first on Follow My Vote.

In the United States, we constantly hold elections: Every two years, we elect a new Congress and, in many states, a new legislature.  Every four years, that’s combined with a presidential election.  Some jurisdictions squeeze local balloting – for sheriff, school board, judge, coroner, you name it – into the years between midterm congressional and presidential elections.  Of course, these are often twice-a-year exercises, since a primary precedes the general election.  Some primaries have runoffs!

Switzerland is the world’s closest approximation of a direct democracy, meaning that the people vote directly on policies and other directives.  Direct democracy is said to be the purest form of democracy that puts the maximum amount of power in the hands of the people.  However, like the United States, the Swiss vote more on average, with at least three or four national votes per year in addition to regional elections.  So how low is voter turnout in both countries?

A mere 49.1% of registered Swiss voters cast ballot sin the 2011 parliamentary elections.  That was admittedly higher than the 41.6% rate in the 2010 U.S. midterm election, but both figures were below the rates recorded in other Western European countries, which typically exceed 75% for their less-frequent elections.

To explain the slumping voter turnout, scholars cite what is known as “voter fatigue”.  In theory, frequent elections are designed to maximize the people’s power over the government and to force the voting public to stay informed.  James Madison himself claimed that voting for the House of Representatives every other year would ensure “immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people.”  In practice, however, frequent elections create barriers for those who would like to be active and informed voters but do not have the time or money to do so.

Both President Obama and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have devised methods of encouraging Americans to vote more, with Obama backing compulsory voting and Clinton basing her platform on reforms for national automatic voter registration.

Regardless of who end up occupying the White House in 2016, it’s clear that changes need to be made.  One solution that is quickly gaining favor is online voting.  The ability to vote remotely lowers transportation and time barriers, and provides a platform for voters to wisely invest their time in learning about the candidates.  What do you think, should we simply vote less to vote more, or should we implement online voting as a solution to low voter turnout?

Read More Here

The post Vote More to Vote Less 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.

The post What Will the Future of Voting Look Like? 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.

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.

Robust voter turnout is fundamental to a healthy democracy. As low turnout is usually attributed to political disengagement and the belief that voting for one candidate/party or another will do little to alter public policy, “established” democracies tend have higher turnout than other counties.

Voter turnout in the United States fluctuates in national elections, but has never risen to levels of most other well-established democracies. In countries with compulsory voting, like Australia, Belgium, and Chile, voter turnout hovered near 90% in the 2000s. Other countries, like Austria, Sweden, and Italy, experienced turnout rates near 80%. Overall, OECD countries experience turnout rates of about 70%, while in the U.S., about 60% of the voting eligible population votes during presidential election years, and about 40% votes during midterm elections.

Read More

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