As discussed in this report, my fellow Follow My Vote Co-founders, Nathaniel Hourt and Will Long, and I knew exactly what we needed to do next… procure grant funding for a decentralized application (dApp) development platform, which we had determined was a prerequisite to developing our secure online voting/polling software!

With this in mind, we put our heads together, developed an impressive grant application, and submitted a Project Pitch to the National Science Foundation’s America’s Seed Fund. As a result, we were invited to submit a full proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF)! However, the story doesn’t end there.

When shopping around for letters of intent the NSF required to submit the full proposal, another organization took a specific interest in our project and offered to provide us with an initial grant budget. We accepted!

That organization is PeerPlays!

PeerPlays is on a mission to humanize the crypto experience, making them a perfect fit for a collaboration with Follow My Vote. We see a paradigm shift on the horizon. With this dApp platform we are developing, we are essentially rebuilding the internet in ways that will change the way in which people communicate/interact with each other in the future. The software applications we use today will function in ways you can’t even imagine.

Now that we have received grant funding, our dApp platform development project is well underway!

It should be understood that the development of this dApp platform is no small undertaking and will likely be a project that spans across multiple years to complete, but rest assured, it will be worth the wait. We also want the world to know that this platform isn’t meant to be ours to own, rather a platform owned by the tech community at large. We’ll get it started, but the goal is to get everyone who’s interested in on the fun!

On that note, if you’re a developer interested in getting involved, be sure to Contact Us!

Over the last year, we also decided to abandon the pursuit of patenting our designs for a secure end-to-end verifiable blockchain-based voting system and method. In our heart of hearts, we decided that these designs were too important to keep to ourselves and released this intellectual property as gift to humanity.

With this move, we were really hoping to spark a new era of innovation in the voting space and foster collaboration between the technology vendors that exist, while encouraging a new wave of potential competitors to enter the voting arena and work toward building secure online voting solutions with true integrity. And, we did.

Upon releasing this IP, staying true to our word, we are now actively exploring partnership/collaboration opportunities in an effort to begin working on the political voting side of things in parallel to the dApp platform. In doing so, we hope to bring a secure and verifiable online voting solution to the people sooner rather than later. 

I’m also actively working with the Government Blockchain Association‘s Voting Working Group on developing the latest certification standards documentation for Mobile Voting Systems to be used internationally. We’ve had some passionate debates on our weekly calls, but things seem to be heading in the right direction.

The political voting side of things can be exciting and all, but keep in mind, we’re just trying to get ahead of things as much as possible. We know we must learn to crawl before we can walk.

To clarify, until this dApp platform is ready for prime time dApp development, our ideal voting system must be deferred in favor of smaller applications to test, refine, and prove out the platform. 

To this end, the first application we plan to launch of this kind on the dApp platform is Pollaris. In a recent announcement regarding Pollaris, we shared the following:

“Named after Polaris, the star which has guided navigators throughout ages past, this initial application will serve as our guiding light. Pollaris will help us to ensure that the platform we build adequately addresses the difficulties of developing blockchain-based applications while enabling us to test our design principles and guidelines to ensure that our solutions are indeed intuitive to people of all walks of life.

In practical terms, Pollaris is a simple polling application intended for use in communities to establish consensus on any issue they may face. The app will be used by administrators to gain insight into member sentiments on the issues at hand, enabling faithful management of the community’s resources in accordance with member preferences. Initial target markets for the app will include Homeowner’s Associations (HOAs) and collegiate student government organizations.”

If you’d like to get involved in the Pollaris project, our Co-Founder and CTO, Nathaniel Hourt, has designed a fun and unique DevChallenge to put your skills to the test. You can learn more here, while keeping in mind that you don’t actually need coding skills to compete. Although experience in app development will be helpful, a motivated individual with no prior development experience could reasonably complete this challenge.

In closing, it’s been an extremely exciting year for Follow My Vote. We’ve come a long way since this same time last year, but the journey continues. So, stay tuned!

NOTE: If you haven’t already done so, be sure to signup for our newsletter and follow us on social media.

The post The State of Follow My Vote -> 2021 Report appeared first on Follow My Vote.

We’ve come to a point in human history where faith in the democratic process has reached all-time lows, especially here in the United States. At Follow My Vote, we believe there is still hope for humanity in this regard.

Ever since we inked our patent pending designs back in 2014, we’ve had aspirations to bring our designs to life, enabling citizen’s throughout the world to cast their votes with integrity on Election Day. However, taking on such a massive endeavor comes with it’s own set of challenges.

We have learned and accomplished a tremendous amount at Follow My Vote over the years, while trying to bring our vision to life. Throughout this time period, we’ve seen various new voting systems come and go, all claiming to be better than the last. However, when analyzing these systems we’ve detected issues that need to be addressed before being implemented on a mass scale. Despite these issues, some of these solutions are actually gaining traction, which is also concerning to us at Follow My Vote.

We’ve seen widespread infighting in the voting space over the years, mainly between those that are all for adopting modern technology where possible to improve the political process for everyone involved vs those that don’t. We have technology providers developing and testing solutions, while university researchers speak out against their efforts and shine light on the vulnerabilities that exist with these solutions. There has been so much back and forth over the years and a lot of misinformation being thrown around that, as a result, it’s almost as if the majority of people have become convinced that technology cannot save us. We simply disagree.

With this in mind, we are releasing this IP today, as a gift to humanity, in hopes to restart the conversation when it comes to question: “Can ‘We the People’ figure out a way to securely conduct verifiable elections online?”

Let’s be real. If you could vote conveniently from your smartphone on Election Day and be reassured by the world-wide technological community at large that your vote was cast as intended and counted as cast, wouldn’t you? That’s what we are really striving for at Follow My Vote.

From Follow My Vote’s perspective we’ve already designed the voting system that, once developed, will have the upmost integrity in existence. Just keep in mind, it’s going to take us some time to bring it to life.

In the meantime, we encourage you to closely review our patent application as published on Google Patents and get involved in the conversation.

Upon review of our patent application, we’d like to immediately draw your attention to the figures or drawings, Figure 1 and Figure 2.

Figure 1, as shown below, is simply a list of key components that exist within our voting system design.

Figure 2, as shown below, showcases our (once patent-pending / now open-source) anonymous voting key registration protocol, which enables someone to have their identity verified for voter eligibility and subsequently be granted access to their eligible election contests in an anonymous way so that, when they cast their votes, they will be able to literally follow their vote(s) into the blockchain-based ballot box and confirm with their own eyes that their vote was cast as intended and counted as cast.

In short, the above figure is the secret sauce with respect to our invention.

Also keep in mind that this powerful protocol could be leveraged outside of the voting space/use case. Another way to interpret the way in which this protocol works is that, based on the identifying information submitted, this person is authorized to do [fill in the blank] anonymously. So, in other words, it could allow someone to submit an identification submission and have a public key anonymously registered to them, which grants them access to something they otherwise wouldn’t have access to, but we digress.

At this point, we’d like to turn your attention to the patent application’s claim language, as it has changed quite a bit over the years, due to shifting from a system and method patent application filing, to simply a method patent application filing. The updated language also more closely reflects the process outlined in Figure 2 above.

AMENDMENTS TO THE CLAIMS – FINAL

The invention claimed is:

1-29. (Cancelled)

While reviewing the patent application, please also take note of and credit the inventor’s of this paradigm shifting innovation that has the real potential to uplift humanity: Adam Ernest (CEO @ Follow My Vote), Nathaniel Hourt (CTO @ Follow My Vote), and Daniel Larimer (CTO @ Block.one).

As a final note with respect to our patent application’s content, we want to be clear that the way in which we’ve described how public key cryptography is leveraged within our system was intentional, although it is a bit atypical of those that have filed for and received cryptography related patents in the past.

To clarify, we specifically refer to signing transactions with a public key throughout our patent application’s content vs a private key. Here’s an explanation from Follow My Vote’s CTO, Nathan Hourt, as to why:

“With regards to the usage of the phraseology “the XYZ transaction is signed with the Voter Public Key,” and similar expressions within the patent application language, this is admittedly an unusual expression of the concept, and this stems in part from the fact that this particular cryptosystem is atypical among asymmetric (or public-key) cryptosystems, and also in part from the way our patent application endeavors to describe the technical processes in high-level, informative language but does not sacrifice accuracy to do so.

First, it is important to examine the unusual properties of the cryptosystem used in our system (and virtually all blockchain systems), namely ECDSA, and distinguish it from most asymmetric cryptosystems (take RSA as an illustrative example). In both ECDSA and RSA, a signature is generated by plugging the message and the private key into a formula, and out of that formula comes the signature. However, the verification process is quite different: in RSA, verification is done by plugging the public key and the signature into a formula, and out of that formula comes the message; however, in ECDSA (our cryptosystem), verification works by plugging in the message and the signature into a formula, and out of that formula comes the public key. This is a critical distinction: RSA and many other asymmetric cryptosystems cannot determine the signer’s identity from the message and signature, they determine the message from the signature and the signer’s identity, but ECDSA determines the signer’s identity from the message and the signature. In light of this, it begins to come clear how the package of the message and the signature could be described as being “signed with the public key” — the public key didn’t do any signing, but the signing embedded it into the message! The message and signature, by nature of the math, come with the public key — it’s just part of the package.

To clarify this meaning, consider a paper contract with a wet-ink signature. We could say “the contract was signed with a pen,” and this would be technically correct, but not particularly informative. We could also say “the contract was signed with the man’s name,” which is also technically correct, but offers a better description of the information conveyed by the signature. In the same way, the patent application says “the transaction signed with the public key,” it is not implied that the public key is the pen that created the signature, but rather that the public key is the information conveyed by the signature. If the patent application said “the transaction signed with the private key,” this would be similar to saying “the contract signed with the pen,” which is technically accurate, but less informative. In the same way as the pen attaches the contractor’s name to the document, the private key attaches the public key to the transaction. It is more informative, then, to say that the message is signed with the public key because this is the useful and relevant information conveyed by the signing, rather than to say that it was signed with the private key, which is not conveyed by the signature but was merely the tool used to make it.

The patent application attempts to clarify how this phrasing is intended in paragraph 0007 by saying “the public key […] signs the transaction, the private key is [used] to authorize the signing” — the public key is the information borne by the signature, but the private key is necessary to authorize one to attach that information to the transaction. It is important to be clear that the public key is the information borne by the signature, as the voter registration process described in FIG. 2 and paragraph 0019 demonstrates that the public key is what is registered to vote, and therefore a transaction with voting decisions must be signed, as per paragraph 0005, with the voter’s public key in order to be recognized as valid. This works because although the private key is necessary to attach the public key to the transaction, the public key is the only information which, like a contractor’s signed name, can be recognized as endorsing the transaction to have effect.

The intended meaning is that the public key is conveyed with the signature, and due to the mechanics of the cryptography, only one who holds the corresponding private key possesses the tool uniquely capable of conveying that particular public key, therefore the message signed with the public key must have come from one who holds the private key, and because the private key is never transmitted, it is extremely difficult for anyone to have the private key except the one who created it, giving the system and its users confidence that the transaction properly signed with a registered public key has the force and effect of the one who registered that public key, even though their specific identity can no longer be recovered.” – Nathaniel Hourt

What does all this mean for Follow My Vote and the voting industry at large?

Follow My Vote has always intended to publish our software as open-source; and, filing a utility patent application for our intellectual property was a strategic move from a defensive perspective.

After speaking with our patent attorney, we’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve done all that we need to do in order to protect ourselves from being sued from practicing our own invention down the line. With this in mind, and in the spirit of the open-source movement, we feel compelled to put our money where our mouth is and abandon our patent application as it exists today.

Moving forward, anyone that wishes to leverage our ideas in their voting system designs can freely do so; and, we hope they do! In other words, what this really means to those competing in the voting space is that these individuals and organizations can now freely innovate on behalf of “We the People” without the impediment of potentially infringing on Follow My Vote’s would-be IP, so that the best ideas can percolate to the top, be tested, and implemented over time.

With our release of this IP, we’re really hoping to spark a new era of innovation in the voting space and foster collaboration between the technology vendors that exist. We also hope to encourage a new wave of potential competitors to enter the voting arena and work toward building secure online voting solutions with true integrity.

For now, we at Follow My Vote have our hands full, as we work to lay the foundation for the development of a secure open-source end-to-end verifiable blockchain-based voting system. But, rest assured that, once we have the opportunity to bring our designs to life, we pledge that we will not attempt to market our solutions for widespread use until they have been battle tested by the brightest tech minds on the planet.

At the end of the day, the world needs to know it’s not about the money for us. Follow My Vote is about solving this global issue for humanity, once and for all, before moving on to the next biggest issue humanity is facing.

We are here to serve the people, plain and simple, and encourage you to follow us on our journey (and perhaps get involved) in the days ahead.

As always, if you are interested in exploring collaboration and/or partnership opportunities, please contact us using the form below:

The post Follow My Vote Releases Patent-Pending IP As A Gift To Humanity appeared first on Follow My Vote.

From CB Insights:

“Elections require authentication of voters’ identity, secure record keeping to track votes, and trusted tallies to determine the winner. In the future, blockchain tools could serve as a foundational infrastructure for casting, tracking, and counting votes — potentially eliminating the need for recounts by taking voter fraud and foul play off the table.

By capturing votes as transactions through blockchain, governments and voters would have a verifiable audit trail, ensuring no votes are changed or removed and no illegitimate votes are added. One blockchain voting startup, Follow My Vote, has released the alpha version of its stake-weighted end-to-end blockchain voting solution.”

About CB Insights:

CB Insights aggregates and analyzes large amounts of data using machine learning, algorithms and data visualization to help customers answer strategic questions using probability and data.

In order, the 30 big industries blockchain could transform according to CB Insights:

1. BANKING
2. PAYMENTS AND MONEY TRANSFERS
3. CYBERSECURITY
4. EDUCATION AND ACADEMIA
5. VOTING
6. CAR LEASING AND SALES
7. NETWORKING AND IOT
8. FORECASTING
9. MUSIC/ENTERTAINMENT RIGHTS AND IP
10. RIDE SHARING
11. STOCK TRADING
12. REAL ESTATE
13. INSURANCE
14. HEALTHCARE
15. SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
16. CLOUD STORAGE
17. ENERGY MANAGEMENT
18. SPORTS MANAGEMENT
19. GIFT CARDS AND LOYALTY PROGRAMS
20. GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC RECORDS
21. GUN TRACKING
22. WILLS AND INHERITANCES
23. RETAIL
24. CHARITY
25. LAW ENFORCEMENT
26. HUMAN RESOURCES
27. BUSINESS AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
28. CREDIT HISTORIES
29. 3D PRINTING/MANUFACTURING
30. CROWDFUNDING

Check out the CB Insights research brief for examples of companies transforming their industry with blockchain technology.

CB Insights Research Brief

Source: cbinsights.com

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

The post Follow My Vote Named In CB Insights “30 Big Industries Blockchain Could Transform” appeared first on Follow My Vote.

What is Approval Voting?

Approval Voting is a single-winner voting method in where a voter can approve of any number of candidates. The candidate that gets the most approval votes wins office. This would help eliminate some of the disadvantages third party candidates have. They no longer would be splitting the vote and voters will be more likely to throw their support behind someone they don’t think it will be wasted on. Approval voting can be considered a form of score voting, with two values, 0 and 1—or a form of majority judgment, with grades restricted to good and poor. Approval voting has been adopted by the Mathematical Association of America (1986), the American Mathematical Society, the Institute of Management Sciences (1987), the American Statistical Association (1987), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1987)

Other Options?

Ranked Voting is in which the candidates are ranked in the order of their fitness for the job. The lowest ranked person gets dropped and then all of their votes go to their second choice and so on and so forth. This ensures that the most popular candidate wins the election whereas in the orginial instance of approval voting, it might be the least suitable approved candidate.

Why this matters?

Our current voting system is flawed as I pointed out in the first paragraph. The only way we can change that is by electing people who support changing the voting system and its technology. You can help by joining our Beta signup list and helping us bug-test our code before we try to market it. Through your help, we can make our voting technology more secure and keep candidates who are the least popular out of office.

About the Author: David Brock is a marketing intern at Follow My Vote.

The post Approval Voting 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.

Listed above is an image that demonstrates how a district could be redrawn to favor the red party. By seemingly taking a pen and drawing lines with no geographical rhyme or reason, an election could easily be fixed. This is gerrymandering, and nearly all counties are subjected to it. With this amount of widespread corruption, is it any wonder that folks are displeased with the current process?

“Contrary to one popular misconception about the practice, the point of gerrymandering isn’t to draw yourself a collection of overwhelmingly safe seats. Rather, it’s to give your opponents a small number of safe seats, while drawing yourself a larger number of seats that are not quite as safe, but that you can expect to win comfortably”

– Christopher Ingram, Washington Post

Currently, it is up to each individual state on what type of primary system they will use for elections. One version is called a closed primary. For example, this means that in order to vote for what candidate would represent the Republican ticket, you would have to register as a Republican to participate in that primary. This means that neither Democrat nor Independent voters have any say in this stage of the process. The second option is an open primary or “top-two” primary. The name says it all, and this essentially means that the top two candidates are voted on by everyone (regardless of political affiliation) to face-off in a general election. Some states are moving to this process, the most notable being Nebraska, which doesn’t even list political affiliation next to a candidate’s name.

Finally, the article lists the electoral college as the last reason millions don’t vote. For those unfamiliar with how the system works, the popular vote actually does not matter.

“When you cast your vote for president, you also vote for an often-unnamed elector who will cast a ballot in a separate election that ultimately will choose the president”

– HowStuffWorks

These unnamed electors are supposed to vote in favor with the popular vote of their state. However, anyone old enough to remember the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election, knows that Gore actually won the popular vote in Florida, with Bush securing the majority of the electoral votes. If our system is not one person, one vote, there could be an argument made as to why any citizen’s vote matters at all.

Our election process is not all doom and gloom, but we can do so much better! Each of these major reasons people don’t vote can all be adjusted. By being aware of local gerrymandering, citizens can lobby their politicians to hold them accountable. By eliminating closed primaries and implementing a nonpartisan top-two system, we can make sure that the best candidates are in the running. Finally, by using a decentralized, transparent online voting system, citizens can audit the vote to hold their electors accountable to vote in favor with state.

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 Major Reasons Millions Don’t Vote appeared first on Follow My Vote.

A consensus has formed around the proposition that polling, especially in multi-candidate presidential races, has become inaccurate and unreliable.

This judgment, rendered by respected experts, exposes the absurdity and corruption of the recent decision by the Commission on Presidential Debates to continue using polls to determine who will be on the stage in the fall of 2016.

Jill Lepore’s excellent article in the Nov. 16 issue of The New Yorker is only the latest in a series of authoritative pieces providing evidence of how “horse-race” polling isn’t working anymore – and explaining why. Dan Balz made similar points in a Washington Post article on Nov. 7. Michael Barone, the dean of election analysts, co-founder of The Almanac of American Politics, and pollster himself for nine years, made the case against polling on Nov. 11 in the Wall Street Journal. He also quoted his American Enterprise Institute colleague, Karlyn Bowman, saying that this may be “the end of polling as we know it.”

The New York Times has run several pieces on the subject, including an op-ed in June by Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers scholar who is past president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research.

Dr. Zukin concluded:

“We are less sure how to conduct good survey research now than we were four years ago, and much less than eight years ago… In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we’re off base.”

The evidence abounds. It includes the Israeli and British elections and, on Nov. 3, the Kentucky governor’s race. The polls had the Democrat winning, but the Republican won in what was practically a landslide, 53% to 44%.

The reasons for the declining accuracy of polls are now well known:

• sharply falling response rates by voters called for their opinions,
• the difficulty and expense involved in reaching people who have abandoned land lines for cell phones (a law bans auto-dialing to mobile phones),
• and the near-impossibility of adjusting results to achieve the proper weighting of demographic groups and to determine which of the respondents will actually show up to vote.

As a result, Gallup, the premier U.S. polling organization, announced recently that it would not poll for the primaries this year and might not poll for the general election either.

But the main problem with polling is the uses to which it is being put – especially making it the main criterion for admission to debates. Lepore quotes Scott Keeter, director of survey research for Pew: “I don’t think polling is really up to the task of deciding the field for the headliner debate.”

Read more at: ivn.us

The post Polls Are Ineffective, So Why Do We Trust Them? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

With a Ph.D in statistics, Clarkson has studied multiple elections in Kansas with similar results that tilt in favor of Republicans. One would think that this information would be public, but apparently there are no official channels for citizens to view these records. Clarkson has filed an open records lawsuit to find the information she is looking for.

“I don’t see anything in there about why I shouldn’t be allowed access other than there is no official channel for private citizens to get access to those records. Therefore, no access allowed,” Clarkson said.

Kris Kobach, Republican election official in Kansas, has asked the Sedgwick County judge to withhold the voting machine tapes, citing the difficulty of copying them. Kobach argued in a recent fax that Clarkson’s request for the physical tapes did not fall under the Kansas Open Records Act, therefore they are prohibited from release.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of Clarkson’s request for the voting machine tapes. Transparency is extremely vital in elections, and citizens should be able to access public records, which include voting trails. Perhaps Clarkson could make her case  under the Sunshine Laws, that “make meetings, records, votes, deliberations and other official actions available for public observation, participation and/or inspection.” After all, if your tax dollars are going to pay for elections, you ought to be able to see how they are being put to use.

At Follow My Vote, we believe in provably honest elections where each and every vote can be publicly accounted for. If you believe in this system, we ask that you join our list of supporters. We are curious to know what our readers think of this issue, and would love to hear from you in the comment section below.

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 Kansas Official Seeks to Block Voting Machine Tapes appeared first on Follow My Vote.

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.

The Democratic National Committee has announced a schedule of six presidential primary debates, beginning on October 13. 2015 in Nevada.

The party made the announcement on the same day that the Republican candidates are set to debate for the first time in Cleveland, Ohio.

Just four of the Democratic debates will be held before the key early nominating contests begin early next year.

After the October debate in Nevada, which will be hosted by CNN, the next Democratic debates are: November 14 in Des Moines, IA (hosted by CBS, KCCI and the Des Moines Register); December 19 in Manchester, NH (hosted by ABC and WMUR); and January 17 in Charleston, SC (hosted by NBC News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute).

Debates are also scheduled to be held in February or March in both Miami and Wisconsin, with dates to be announced.

Two of Clinton’s rivals have said they are upset about the way the party has scheduled the debates.

“By inserting themselves into the debate process, the DNC has ironically made it less democratic. The schedule they have proposed does not give voters—nationally, and especially in early states—ample opportunity to hear from the Democratic candidates for President,” former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley said in a statement.

Read more at: nbcnews.com.

The post 2016 Democratic Party Debates appeared first on Follow My Vote.