These guys are legitimate. It is really beautiful piece of technology. They want to release it in July-ish to get ready for the 2016 election cycle. The reason being that they want to expose the voting fraud. One could use their software, and gov software and compare of the two. The non-anarchist will soon realize how corrupted the system is. That is their goal.
First things first. It has been proven my country had systematical fraud in the 2011 elections. Before tinkering around the edges, we need to fix the big picture. If the election result is predetermined, it does not matter what we do to campaign financing laws etc.
Same kind of thing happened here during the last couple elections. How do you think Harper got reelected? (Or even elected in the first place.) Robocalls! And a lot of fraud. But we only found out about that conclusively after the fact.
Hey, all! I’m Nathan with Follow My Vote. I’d love to answer any questions you have about our system. Thanks, Grizmoblust, for making this thread.
@Subnet That’s correct, we’re initially targeting the BitShares blockchain. We’re designing our system to be as blockchain agnostic as possible, though, so we can easily port to other chains as it makes sense to do so.
@Blindsite2k We’re hoping to shake up a lot of the process, and we think making a completely transparent and auditable voting system will have profound effects on the current political system, whether they formally adopt our technology or not. For example, in our system you can cast your vote and then replace it later if you change your mind or learn new information. Also, anyone can count the votes themselves (using our open source software) to get a tally they can trust, and because all voting data is public on the blockchain, anyone can do this at any time, even before the polls close. Now think about the combination of those two features: you can cast a vote for your favorite candidate, then watch and see how the results stack up, and change your vote later based on your analysis of who has the best shot of winning. We think that could break the two-party system and give independents a real shot. It also adds much-needed transparency to the unofficial polls, which currently cannot be trusted at all, but have a substantive effect on how people vote.
But with cognizance of the issues reivanen is pointing out, I personally see our system’s true value as being a tool that voluntary societies will benefit enormously from. At the end of the day, I don’t really want voting to be used to point a gun, but I do think voting is valuable information. Having a free software voting system available will, I think, be invaluable in enabling anarchic societies to communicate effectively and solve problems.
Our mission at Follow My Vote is to promote Truth and Freedom by empowering individuals to find and implement noncoercive solutions to societal problems. If that’s a mission you think you can get behind, we invite you to check out our ambassador program and our code contributor program. Let me know if you have any questions!
The ramifications of this are huge! I assume it will be possible to tailor the qualities of each poll to best suit it’s needs. As an example, if I were to set up a poll could I do things like:
Allow each participant to change their vote a maximum number of times.
Allow participants to finalize their vote by ‘locking it’, or to cancel it all together.
Allow varying weightings for the votes of different participants.
Allow the duration of the poll to be ‘smart’. Maybe it could use an algorithm which takes into account percentage of all participants who have voted, or the distribution of votes.
One other thought… would it be possible for a poll to allow the use of conditional statements (such as ‘if’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘else’) with reference to subsets within the poll, or to other polls?
I’m making this up as I go along, but I’d like to get a feel for the level of customization we’re likely to see. Perhaps it’ll be a gradual process of adding features with time. How readily will you be able to modify your system? Do you expect to release a platform and for users to jump in and create their own polls? Or will you be creating many different customized setups for different clients?
I don’t expect answers to all of these questions - you can pick the ones you have the time or inclination to answer. I’m just hoping to get a better feel for what you’re doing. Thanks in advance!
Great questions! All of your bulleted items are possible. In particular, for the third one, our initial release will be a stake-weighted voting system, where each voter’s votes are weighted according to his balance of some asset. This is directly applicable to shareholder voting in a company (aka proxy voting), but is useful for a wide array of other use cases as well. The BitShares community is particularly excited about this feature, as it will enable them to prioritize development based on what the biggest stakeholders in the network want.
We’re taking a lean approach to developing our system (Release Early, Release Often) and trying to make sure we’re providing the maximum value to our users as quickly as possible. As we go we’ll be doing stake weighted polls of an asset called MERIT to prioritize development. Users who want to influence our development can earn MERIT through our code contributor or ambassador programs (or other ways of providing value; we’re not stingy!), buying it from others on the BitShares exchange, using the software once it’s released (suggesting cool features or improvements, filing bug reports, buying FMV services, etc), or contracting with FMV for priority development, consulting, and/or support.
I’m not quite seeing what you mean with the conditional statements… Can you give me an example of what this could look like in practice?
As a basic example it could be used in a way to automate ones vote in a situation such as:[quote=“modprobe, post:9, topic:7267”]
you can cast a vote for your favorite candidate, then watch and see how the results stack up, and change your vote later based on your analysis of who has the best shot of winning
[/quote]
So one could create statements such as “Vote for Adam if Louise is in the lead, else vote for Louise”.
What I was thinking originally was actually much more broad than this single example, but I can’t elaborate further today because I’m short of time.
Could there be several elements to vote on within a poll? Perhaps with voting for each element closing sequentially to enable reference to the result of the previous elements by the subsequent ones? In this case, if it’s all done transparently (so that users can see other users voting ‘constructs’) it could be a very powerful tool so long as the information can be presented in a meaningful way. The users voting ‘construct’ could be a set of logical statements with ‘if’, ‘not’ ‘or’ etc. clauses.
Sorry if this isn’t yet clear - I’ve rushed my explanation. I’ll come back tomorrow with more time!
Everything you describe sounds technically possible. We can create contests with arbitrary contestant and tallying semantics. For instance, we could easily support contests which ask the user to rank several options in order of preference (ranked choice voting), or contests which allow the user to select several candidates she approves of (approval voting). We could support liquid democracy, where voters can vote normally, or delegate their votes to other voters. We can eventually support pretty much anything that can be unambiguously serialized and tallied; the biggest issue is prioritization.
Of course, everything is open source, too! If you want a kind of contest we don’t support, feel free to tackle it yourself, and most likely we’ll be happy to merge it in and give you some MERITs for your effort!
@modprobe Do you have any way to prevent or counteract lobbying or vote buying? Lobbying seems to be the downfall of all democracy. Of course one could argue anything can be bought but then we’re back to a plutocracy and there doesn’t seem to be much point in voting in the first place.
@janitor Whoops! Sorry about that. Fixed now. I probably need to update that document soon, anyways. It’s gotten a bit outdated. I’ve just removed the things which are now incorrect at least.
@Blindsite2k My personal opinion is that lobbying and vote-buying are essential failures of democracy, where an incentive has been created to corrupt the voting system, because the voting system is thought to magically grant the right to violence. But voting is useful in far more arenas than democracy!
What the voting system does offer is some protection against voter coercion, in that voters can cast replacement votes when the threat is gone, or they can revoke their online vote and vote on paper (if the election allows paper voting) if they would feel safer doing that.
My vision for our system is that it will allow voluntaryist societies to identify and solve their problems in non-coercive ways. A trustworthy, transparent and anonymous voting system will be a valuable asset to such a community.
Allowing sponsored media is the downfall, without it their is no lobbying bribery impact. The stupidity of saying money is speech is a downfall as are corporate rights but they are secondary. The key problem is captured puppet media. A sponsored media has the ultimate conflict of interest and is captured, supplyside and to down by definition. Its purpose is censorship, drowning out, misrepresenting the public and selection and helping to vote rig.
When is there not an incentive to vote a particular way be it taking the form of gifts, bribes or favors? Also this is particularly relevant given a representitive democracy with elected officials and open votes of said elected officials.
Would you please define “voter coercion” and give some examples of when this may apply. I’ve never heard of such a thing before.
We’re diverging from the topic here, so I won’t comment any further except to say that “voter coercion” is when a voter is pressured into voting a certain way by some other person or group. It’s an issue frequently brought up when discussing online voting systems, though I’ve never seen any data on how common this is or how many voters are concerned by it.
Or we just buy a vote directly as is legal in some places. We get you over an econonmic barrel so that you are starving and they we offer to buy your vote (vote for a bit of food) so we can keep you in that situation and keep buying your vote to continue to keep you in that situation.
I probably need to update that document soon, anyways. It’s gotten a bit outdated. I’ve just removed the things which are now incorrect at least.