Quote from: bytemaster on December 03, 2014, 01:49:31 pm We do not care *if* governments accept our voting solution. Our business model for VOTE is independent of government acceptance.

That is good to hear .. I was concerned about this and IMHO we should communicate this accordingly



If you bring it straight to the people and hold a parallel election and offer them a compelling goal: help us achieve higher voter turnout than traditional elections and restore integrity to the process then government will have no choice but to pay attention or fight it. Either way it brings massive media attention to the cause.Just 36.4 percent of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in 2014 which means the elected officials are operating on approval of less than 19% of the population (on average). If you factor in that many of their votes were really "votes against" the other guy you have a situation where only about 10% of the voting population actually supports the people in office.So if we can petition the government directly and call for honest voting and gain over 10% voter turnout we can start to claim that we have a mandate from the people.So how can we get to 10% voter turnout without government mandate to use our system? It is a multi step process but it involves making people believe they can have a greater impact for their cause by voting in our system than by going to the polls.Some research suggests that over 10% of the population is not confident their vote is counted correctly. Ron Paul scored support of 10% of the republican primary and most of his supporters are very much aware of how rigged the process is.So we can turn this into a campaign issue. Does your candidate support or encourage honest voting. Every time a voting controversy pops up it is an opportunity to win converts who decide to "opt out" of the official process (reducing official voter turnout) and "opt in" to our new process.So each person we can convince to abandon the existing system (vote against it) and join our system (vote for it) gives us 2x bang for the buck. Suppose we can score 3% of voters who opt-out today, 3% of voters who use both systems, and 3% of voters who switch? Voter turnout would fall to 30% and our turnout would be 9%.The key here is to make voting so easy and provide some alternative benefits to encourage participation and referrals that it spreads. It is much easier to market voting than BitShares. But once you get them hooked on voting, the conversion to BTS is much easier.Anyway, we have a solution that costs governments (taxpayers) nothing provides "free voting" and saves lives. We have a very compelling pitch for voting (we haven't revealed it all yet). So politicians can gain a lot of political capital by supporting our efforts but it will be very costly to attack a provably fair, private, and honest election process.After all voting is 90% about expressing your opinion for everyone else to see and 10% about actually selecting a candidate. We are selling people a "voice" where the current system leaves people powerless to express it.