Hello, Everyone,
My name is Daniel Wolf and I am managing the Democracy Counts! startup. I am a relative newcomer to cryptocoins. While advising Devin, Dawn and Alec on securities/corporation law for their blockchain biz I began studying up on blockchain. During my studies I realized that it might be possible to audit elections. I asked Devin, one thing led to another, and here we are.
I am a lawyer (Harvard) and political scientist (UC San Diego). I have always been passionate about solving big societal problems. For instance I invented a landmine clearing technology and developed a market-oriented public-health approach for improving landmine clearing. I have started an NGO, a university institute, two tech companies, and run a public company where I had to clean up a $50MM scam. While at Harvard I wrote the world's second guide for election observers and the first tailored to a particular country (Nicaragua), and later wrote a string of scholarly articles about elections and democratic institutions. My election fairness framework was adopted in 2012 by an international observer mission to observe the presidential election in Taiwan. While a Fulbright Fellow in Nicaragua and El Salvador I correctly predicted and explained the surprising end of the Salvadoran civil war. Some of my former election-monitor colleagues are advising us by asking us the tough questions we need to answer (with strategy and technology) to achieve our goals.
Some good questions have been asked here and in the prior board while I was writing my post (sorry for the long delay - while writing I had an emergency medical situation). Here are a few answers:
Our strategic goal is to generate data such that on the night of elections the official results can be compared with our data, discrepancies flagged and analyzed, and the evidence then handed over to legal teams. The lawyers would go into court the next day and ask for an injunction against certification of the results and for an order to investigate the suspicious election system. Our strategy is intended to clear the relatively low hurdle required for a preliminary injunction, which is a much cheaper and easier threshold than definitively proving fraud, by doing so to stimulate further mandated action. In essence it is a "trim tab" strategy a la Buckminster Fuller, in which we make a small change in the pressures acting on a complex system and those pressures (judicial and political in this case) in turn exert a much larger pressure on the system. (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preliminary_injunction -- The system is not allowing me to post external links so you'll have to complete these links.)
It has been our goal from the beginning to provide audit evidence in real time, but we have defined "real time" to mean "immediately after the polls close", not "while the voting is going on", because until the voting is closed there are no official results to compare with, making earlier monitoring a useless exercise. (Contrast this with the standard data collection methods used for normal election challenges, which take many months to gather and then maybe convince a judge that the statistical and circumstantial evidence is strong enough for further investigation, meanwhile allowing the usurper to take office and do things like start unjust wars.)
Viz "being real", you can research me easily, as I am all over the web. Here are a few links:
today.law.harvard.edu/feature/a-common-good/ (go the the very end)
jmu.edu/cisr/journal/5.2/notes/danielwolf.htm
linkedin.com/in/danielhwolf
We are following Devin's guidance completely on choice of coin. I have questioned him intensely about the short- and long-term pros and cons of NXT both for utility and security, and am satisfied with it. If we change coins after the beta test in the June 7 California primary election, or after the general election in November, or at any future time, the decision will be taken strictly on the basis of the appropriateness and performance of the coin for our purposes, not because we are fickle or profit-driven, which we are not.
The standards we have adopted as our own may be found here [verifiedvoting.org/voting-system-principles], with the exception that during the audit we may allow voters to be able to prove in court that their audit ballots were recorded per their intentions. This is a violation of the anonymity principle for elections, but the audit is not an election, and the requirement of providing judicially cognizable evidence of audit reliability might require some flexibility on this score. Note, however, that we would not enable this feature in countries where a de-anonymized expression of intention might endanger people.
After November we plan to release the audit system for free use by democracy activists around the world, and to begin collaborating with civil society groups in other countries to create an International Federation of Election Auditors. We will follow this eventually with the release of a true voting system that follows the verifiedvoting.org principles in every relevant respect.
I hope this has not been too long a post; thanks for reading this far!
Dan
Author
Topic: Introductions & Join ups (Read 28674 times)