Votem uses blockchain technology to strengthen democratization

Rage Review : Votem is a blockchain startup dedicated to blockchain voting systems. Before its establishment, it widely solicited ideas to achieve this goal. Currently, its system has emerged in the fan voting of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the United States and is the largest blockchain system involved in voting. The company has also acquired the intellectual property rights of companies that have cooperated with multiple judicial institutions, which is believed to be helpful for the development of the company's creativity.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Electronic voting is not new. To some extent, paperless voting has been done for decades. Serious legal security breaches are not new either. The HBO documentary “Hacking Democracy” details this.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts know there’s a good solution to the problem of electronic voting. The blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin may be the most secure design available. Pete Martin, Votem’s founder and CEO, is a veteran of SAP consulting. He attended a business conference a few years ago where the speaker asked the audience to come up with an idea that could positively impact 1 billion people.

"I sold my consulting firm and seriously considered going into national politics," he said in an interview. "A lot of people said, you know, Pete, you're an entrepreneur, you're not a politician. So, you know, if this is what you want to do, great, we'll support you, but make sure it's something you really want to do."

Pete Martin

“So I asked for a conference to put on my Peter Diamandis. He led a “moonshot workshop” where he asked the audience to articulate their own definition of “purpose for mass change.” He said, “You’re a bunch of smart entrepreneurs who are good at making money. But I don’t want you to focus on the business, I want you to focus on the impact. So he said, I want you to take out a blank piece of paper and write down what you will do before you die to positively impact a billion people in the world.” I took out my blank piece of paper and wrote “mobile voting,” and I knew that would be my legacy.

Pete Martin is not a blockchain engineer, and it would be unfair to call him a "bitcoin enthusiast" or a "cryptocurrency enthusiast." His focus is to increase voter turnout by making it more convenient for people to vote. Martin said that when forming Votem, he reached out to several people he thought might be helpful in achieving this goal, including Michael Barrett, the former chief information security officer (CISO) of PayPal.

Martin and his team then set a course forward to enable other types of digital voting, such as mobile voting, and issued an open call for mobile voting platform ideas, offering a $230,000 reward. There is no requirement that the solution must utilize blockchain technology, but the main criterion set out in the document is that it “cannot be hacked.”

“We got almost 200 responses from people in almost 30 different countries. About a third of them said basically it’s not feasible. Some said ‘use a quantum computer.’ A third used electronic technology that has been used for online voting around the world, called MixNets. And then about a third used blockchain technology. We ended up giving part of the award to an engineer in Canada who had the idea of ​​using a non-Bitcoin blockchain for voting. He had a very detailed specification document. In addition to part of the innovation grant, we also received the intellectual property and started designing a blockchain-based mobile voting platform.”

Martin said standard proof-of-work blockchains are not fit for purpose. He also said that talking to the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) about words like "bitcoin," "cryptocurrency," and public blockchains is like anathema, but their approval is essential for use in official elections. Martin said the company will eventually create a new form of blockchain framework that is "a cross between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, which we call 'Proof of Vote?' The reason for this is that votes should not wait for "blocks" to be "mined." It must be processed at the time of the vote. He said his company is very different from the blockchain task forces that appear almost every week.

“The two main differences are that we understand the election business and have successfully run statewide elections in the US and understand the incredible complexity of presidential elections. Additionally, we were focused on getting the latest EAC certification because most states require this in order to sell end-to-end voting systems. In fact, we’ve gone through the filings in detail and anything that looks like the Bitcoin blockchain will never work. They won’t let you connect to the open internet to count votes. The whole concept of having public confirmation of votes will never work in this world. These people will look at Bitcoin, look at Ethereum, and go ‘hmm’.”

Mobile voting could take identity verification to a whole new level, but Martin notes that most U.S. states prohibit invasive identification technology. Even asking for photo ID is controversial. To fit in with existing norms, any system could only ask voters to identify themselves, or use any method permitted by state law. However, current and future generations of Americans define privacy violations differently, and one could easily imagine a world in which voters prove their identities with fingerprints or eye scans.

Before the last election, Votem purchased the intellectual property of Konnech Inc., a company that has contracts with multiple jurisdictions. Foreign voters from Montana (or people working in other countries or the military) are able to vote using the internet. Martin considers this division of the company to be its “educational” side, as they ultimately intend to have their products rely on blockchain technology.

To this end, their blockchain-based platform was used for the “fan voting” portion of the 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction shortlist. Nearly 2 million votes were cast using blockchain, making it the largest voting exercise to date to utilize blockchain technology. Over 60% of the votes were cast via mobile phones.

“We wanted to prove to the world that you could use blockchain technology to do online voting in a highly scalable way. But what we did for the Hall of Fame would never be applied to a government project. It would never meet all the requirements.”

But it's a start.

For years, Bitcoin detractors and supporters alike have argued that blockchain will be useful, whether Bitcoin succeeds or not. Votem has found a way to change society as a whole. The biggest reason millennials don’t vote is lack of convenience, and a big controversy in the last presidential election was that “illegal immigrants cast millions of votes.” These issues can be eliminated with technology, and Votem seems to be the most promising way to do that right now.