As 2024 is coming to a close, we’d like to take this opportunity to update our community on the progress we’ve made since releasing our The State of Follow My Vote -> 2022 Report.

In 2023, we considered taking on investment capital and went through all the phases startups take in order to prepare for such a business move. We created a product roadmap documenting the technological advancements we need to make in order to realize our vision of developing open-source end-to-end verifiable blockchain-based voting software for use in political elections worldwide. Then, we cataloged the software products we could release to potential customers along the way and forecasted the resources we would ultimately need to get us to the finish line. From there, we produced a go to market strategy for the initial non-anonymous version of Pollaris, analyzed our business costs associated with providing our B2B SaaS products to our initial set of customers, and established pricing models that would enable us to achieve our target profitability margins.

In short, it was a phenomenal exercise to have gone through.

During this exercise, we learned a tremendous amount about business and what it takes to succeed. More importantly, we learned more about ourselves and what we were willing to go through at this stage of our business in order to be successful. Ultimately, we determined that it wasn’t the right time to take on investment capital so we decided to pass on the opportunity. At this point, we are still booststrapping the business on the road to releasing our MVP.

Over the last year, one of our cofounders and CTO of Follow My Vote, Nathaniel Hourt, has made meaningful progress on our MVP, the initial version of Pollaris, despite a few setbacks. At this point, we are extremely close to reaching a sellable release of the software. If you’d like to get a peek at where we are officially at in our progress toward this goal, be sure to visit our project milestone on GitLab.

During this same time period, I’m happy to report that I have made significant progress in working with my fellow colleagues in the Government Blockchain Association’s (GBA) Voting Working Group to pave the way for the next generation of voting systems to be used in political elections worldwide.

In addition to the work we have completed in the past, such as the thought provoking “Remote Ballot Marking & Return Comparison” and recommendations to improve the Election Assistance Commission’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, we released a Voting Supplement to the GBA’s Blockchain Maturity Model (BMM) which serves as the initial version of our standards documentation for blockchain-based voting solutions.

In 2025, the GBA Voting Working Group’s two main objectives will be to advance the adoption of the GBA’s BMM and to secure grant funding for the members of the group. We also hope to make progress with respect to our standards documentation which will forever be a work in progress.

The reality is that, in order to make change on a global scale, we must first make change at the local level. Therefore, another initiative we’ve established for 2025 is to secure the support of Local Election Officials (LEOs) for the adoption of blockchain-based voting solutions in political elections, as they are the individuals responsible for procuring voting systems technology using government funding. As we begin to secure support from LEOs, we’ll be in a better position to change or enact any laws, as needed, in order to allow for the use of this groundbreaking technology in our elections.

However, to make lasting change in the ways in which we are allowed to cast our vote on Election Day, we are going to need support from the population at large.

With this in mind, I have a favor to ask of you. If you haven’t already done so, please share a link to this post with your professional network, social media connections, friends, and family, allowing them to join us on our journey and fight for the right to securely vote from your own device on Election Day.