Voting for a Mobile Future

Pete Martin
Votem
Published in
4 min readNov 16, 2017
How Votem is Improving Trust, Transparency, and Efficiency in Voting

Freedom House recently released a report detailing the increased level of ‘meddling’ by foreign entities in national elections. Reports of Russian interference in the U.S. and external influences in at least 17 other countries were highlighted. These findings are on the heels of several published reports that show trust in the democratic process is at an all-time low.

To address these attacks on democracy, we set about a bold course almost three years ago to build a more secure and reliable voting experience for both public and private elections with a level of verifiability, accessibility, security, and transparency that doesn’t exist today.

Our singular goal is to restore trust in elections globally.

By leveraging the power of Votem’s blockchain voting platform, organizations will realize the benefit of having every vote independently validated, cryptographically secured, made fully transparent and immutably permanent. This means a more efficient way to administer elections with unparalleled security.

With more than 5 million votes cast to date and clients including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the State of Montana, we have a proven track record of helping companies and governments build trust, increase voter turnout, and most importantly, offer a secure and verifiable online solution for voters.

Current voting mechanisms are well-known by security experts to be vulnerable to attack. Many technology solutions are insecure, both because they are outdated (a study by the Brennan Center showed that 43 states in the U.S. were using voting machines for public elections that were at least a decade old), and because they are privately owned by only a handful of providers who have little incentive to improve them.

Many people think that paper ballots are the only solution to these industry problems. However, paper-based systems, which are still used by three-quarters of the U.S., come with their own risks, not to mention an extraordinarily high cost for governments and by extension, their constituents.

Given our trusted operational experience, we understand that solving this issue is not easy and technology alone is not a panacea. The scale and complexity of modern elections require a combination of technological innovation, organized processes, and dedicated elections people. For example, in Los Angeles County, the 2016 General Election required 25,000 poll workers across 4,523 sites, ultimately costing over $42 million.

We acknowledge the big job ahead of us and know that we can’t do it alone. It will take a community of interested parties to help us strengthen our platform, localize it for language and jurisdictional regulations, and deploy it globally for use in all types of elections.

With these objectives in mind, we have decided to launch our VAST Token through a public token sale early next year with a private pre-sale starting immediately.

To maintain the highest level of integrity and regulatory compliance, the Votem offering will be conducted using a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (“SAFT”), an SEC-compliant open source framework produced by Cooley LLP, Protocol Labs, AngelList and CoinList. We are thrilled to be one of the first companies to leverage the SAFT framework.

At Votem, we believe that true innovation starts with rethinking some of our most basic and most important systems. For us, this means rebuilding trust in voting by creating the new, transparent, and secure standard for election-based decisions.

It’s time to rebuild our trust in voting.

We hope you’ll join us. Check out our token sale Executive Summary at https://votem.io and subscribe to our mailing list for more information on our token sale.

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Pete Martin
Votem
Editor for

Technology executive, serial entrepreneur, mobile voting revolutionary and struggling classic rock drummer ;)