Financial

Phase one was primarily to obtain patents in over 50 countries. This has been done.

Also as a part of phase one, we will provide a discussion forum, a wiki, and a blog. The forum will act as a super FAQ, the wiki will inform participants of implementation details, and the blog will enable users to express their opinions and provide feedback to us.

The above objectives will complete the first phase of the project. For this first phase we budgeted $100,000.

For the second phase of the project we have budgeted $200,000 to be used as follows:

The second phase will create a detailed design and programming specification, including the software tools to be used, the application environments, the APIs, team member responsibilities, testing procedures, expected development time frames, and API documentation.

This process will include mock file and table layouts and sample ballot structures. We estimate $100,000 will be sufficient to pay for this phase, but we are allowing for possibile cost overruns that could take total expenses for this phase to $200,000.

The third phase of this development will be to develop and test the software. Most of the expense for this phase will be in testing and verification under load. We also may offer a hefty reward for any successful hacks of our products being tested. We are budgeting $400,000 for this phase, but are allowing for the possibility that cost overruns could take expenses for this phase to $800,000.

The fourth and final phase, will be to enlist first time adopters and actually perform elections. This could require as much as a million US dollars ($1,000,000) before the monetization exceeds the expenditure level depending on marketing expense, contract terms, and how many governments sign on for the first round. See the investment package for a detailed explanation of this rollout.

Funding
Private investment opportunities are available. Contact us using the email or phone number at the bottom of this page.

This project will change the trajectory of democracy worldwide. Helping to facilitate the launch of this project is definitely something to be proud of.

Although this project does not favor any person or party, there may be powerful interests that wish to prevent it from being used. That is a risk we must face if we want democracy to be fully implemented worldwide.

Many people will distrust any form of electronic voting, just as they did using credit cards online for a several years. However, the ability of independent professionals to verify our software while it is in use will overcome their fears in time. And the ability of each voter to continually see their ballot over time will provide substantially improved confidence in the system, and therefore encourage participation.

Some people will object to retaining any connection between the voter and his or her ballot for fear of subsequent disclosure, retaliation and/or pressure on voters. However, we have taken extensive precautions to protect voter identities. Note that even if a ballot's voter were to be identified at some point, it would not enable the alteration or falsification of any ballots. Since the effort and expense required to overcome the obfuscation we have put in place would be huge (assuming it were possible), it would not yield a meaningful payback. So we expect that it will never happen.

Competitive Analysis
There are many new software applications being developed and tested that pertain to elections, including voter registration, the voting process and various monitoring functions. One such application is described at intuitive voting. Several important voting aspects are addressed by such software that will encourage participation by the voting public. We, at Accountable Democracy, applaud such applications. We expect a plethora of such applications to use our API in order to provide a seamless, comfortable user interface for facilitating many aspects of the voting process. Our role is providing tallying support for such applications that is extremely transparent, immutable, unhackable, and auditable, while we provide continuous voter access to their ballots.

www.scytl.com describes the current state of the art of voting systems being developed and implemented, and security issues that pertain to them. Their perspective of security issues can be downloaded in PDF form here. The Scytl system is a very nice step forward in the voting software industry. However it is considerably less transparent than the Accountable Democracy design.

In the Scytl system there is no way for the public to be sure their system is not being hacked after ballots are accepted by the tallying server. They do provide a method for voters to verify that their ballots have been counted. However, once their ballot has been transferred to the counting server the ballot connection to the voter and the voter registration system is lost and all of the data is encrypted. Any additional fictitious ballots could be undetected. If malevolent entities obtained the decryption keys ballots could be changed, and if that were to happen the lack of tracks from ballots back to individual voters make the system unauditable. The Accountable Democracy design is an order of magnitude more transparent and the voter never loses direct access to his or her ballot. Our system uses a different cryptographic method to protect ballots. The ballot file can be made public and the actual votes are easily read.

Voters can access their ballots while they remain

anonymous. The software can be peer reviewed (we will help you replicate it), and the programs in use are publicly monitored throughout the election process.

There are many considerations involved in the use of online voting systems. One resource that comprehensively describes such considerations is The Electoral Knowledge Network. It discusses several types of security issues and many, if not all, of the issues that pertain to providing online voting and monitoring. However, many of the problematic situations addressed by that discussion simply don't exist in the Accountable Democracy system. For example, there are no vote tallies stored anywhere in the system, so there are no tallies to tamper with. And because the ballot connection to actual voters and voter registrations is maintained, the addition of fictitious ballots or any removal of ballots is easily audited and detected. In our system the voting process takes place leisurely well before election day. This encourages voter participation and allows any anomalies to be discovered and corrected in a timely, unhurried manner.

Last but not least, Microsoft has produced a set of open source computer programs that implement many of the features in the Scytl system. It is a comprehensive approach to using electronic ballots along with paper ballots that is a huge step forward in vote tallying technology. Unfortunately many of the existing points of election vulnerability are preserved. Election Guard uses a sophisticated method of encrypting ballots that allows them to be tallied while they remain in encrypted form. Unfortunately this is a huge step backward when it comes to voter trust. Making ballots unreadable except to the chosen few is exactly what people distrust about any form of electronic vote processing.
In contrast to the Accountable Democracy method .. in Election Guard:

If a hacker put in place a rendition of the software that acts like an unmodified version, but alters ballots selectively during the recording process, it would occur undetected. In essence it would be acting as an imposter. Furthermore, because Election Guard is open source it would be relatively easy to create such a program. There is no way, in Election Guard, to continuously assure that the software is in fact being used unmodified.
The voter has no way to let the system report who she or he voted for. So, once again, the technology is saying "just trust me."
Since 1) ballots are not continuously traceable to voter registration data, 2) many registered voters do not vote, and 3) ballots are all encrypted, it would not be difficult for malware to add ballots to the mix without detection or auditability.
The most important vulnerability of Election Guard is that it is designed to support paper ballots, ostensibly to reassure voters that recounts are possible. But in fact that opens the door to several vulnerabilities identified on the Existing Procedure page. By decentralizing voting that occurs all on one day (i.e. the way voting is done now) it is not possible to prevent all fraudulent activity at the local level.

The Accountable Democracy design eliminates many existing points of vulnerability rather than trying to control them or perform them better.

As an aside, if a state wishes to print hardcopy (paper ballot) backup to the electronic system on election day, that capability will also be included.