 Welcome to Jalassette News, it gets up stories and crypto current digital assets and break them down into bite-sized pieces. Today, it's all about votes, V-O-A-T-Z dot com. It's about blockchain voting is absolutely here. It's going to fix fraud, excessive waiting and transparency in the election process. So this isn't something you can invest in. This isn't something to make a bunch of money off of. But it's one of those projects that is going to change the world. I got a chance to sit down with the CEO Nimit Swani and he told me all about how this is going to work, how it's going to affect everyday people in the future and what the progress already is. They've already been a part of 70 different elections, but that's not the problem. Their problem is the amount of people, politicians and the fud that is being spread about this project. This is quite a long interview so we're going to go over just the basics today before we jump in with Nimit. So let's get going. So let's take a look at the market, shall we? It is October 29th, it's 1.45pm. I just interviewed Nimit around 10 o'clock so I'm going to get this out. So what is happening in our market? Well, Bitcoin, as predicted, took a little bit of a tumble. I actually think it was below 13,000 for a little bit. Now it's above, it's around 13.5, up 2.5% in 24 hours or 5.6 for a seven day. People were talking about if Bitcoin can just get above 14,000 there will be no resistance when we go to 20,000. Well, it's not how it works. So Ethereum, down to 390, but hey, it's almost a four and some pretty happy with that. Tether is hitting at a 16 billion market cap, XRP, still pretty stable, around 25. Bitcoin cash down, Binance coin, Chainlink, everything's down. Let's just say everything's down. That's just what the truth. Crypto.com is up. Congratulations. Okay, B is up a little bit. Who cares? Die, NEM, Ethereum Classic. Ethereum Classic with their multiple 51% attacks, amazing. And Celsius Network, of course, they're up. When I really want to get into it as heavy as possible, that's when it goes, but that's just my luck. Remember, dollar cost average, everything should work out, UMA up 5.7, so yeah, about the right. Yarn down to 12%. Before we get into the interview with NEMET, let me just go over the big stories in a very, very, very condensed version. So this was crazy. Michael Saylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy, he personally owns 248 million in Bitcoin. That's a lot of Bitcoin, not just part of its subsidiary or the company, him. He owns a quarter of a billion dollars with a Bitcoin. I mean, I thought that his company buying 430 million was a ton, but I guess that's not the big story. The big story is this guy really likes Bitcoin and really believes in it. So hats off to that guy. Michael, congratulations. Also Binance is in trouble. Well, that's a bummer. There was a document called the Tai Chi document that reveals Binance's elaborate, elaborate scheme to avoid the regulator. So real quick, what's happening here is that there's two Binances. There's Binance Global, essentially, and there's Binance US, and they made Binance US to pretty much appease the regulators. Well, there's a Tai Chi document. This was out in like 2018, which a slideshow believed to have been seen by senior Binance execs is a strategic plan to execute a bait and switch while the then unnamed entity set up operations in the US to distract regulators with feigned interest and compliance measures will be put in place to move revenue in the form of licensing fees and more to the parent company Binance. I guess Binance US into Binance. All the while potential customers would be taught how to evade geographic restrictions while technological workarounds were put in place. So looks like somebody got their hand caught in the cookie jar. We'll see how that all plays out. They asked for a response and of course Binance is like, we're not answering that. So we'll see how it all goes, but not a good day for Binance. And also in the biggest news of potentially the whole day or maybe the whole week, Avante unanimously wins a Bitcoin banking charter. This is Caitlyn Long. She's an ex Morgan Stanley exec. She's really smart lady. She's been into finance for, you know, her entire career and she is the second special depository banking license in Wyoming to provide fiat and Bitcoin cryptocurrencies and digital assets. They are falling on the heels of Kraken and the dominoes just continue to fall. So congratulations Caitlyn. Great job. She even states right here that this is a two and a half years culmination effort to get to today. So again, there are no overnight successes. There are successes, but they take years to do. So congratulations Caitlyn and to the Avante team. So those are the big stories. Let's get into my pet project voting. So I don't know where you are at watching this video. I don't know if you're in Europe or you're in Canada or in Mexico or United States. But just, you know, in the United States, we talk about voting a lot, but a lot of us don't do it. And this is a statistic that I've seen echoed throughout many a different data analytics and it talks about the percent turnout of how many people actually turn out to vote in the presidential elections. And usually it's about 50% somewhere around there, 57, 55, something like that. And there's a lot of different barriers to voting here. I know like in Estonia, I've heard great things that they are actually able to vote since 2005 online, which is great. So I am big into blockchain, DLT, Cryptocurrency, obviously I have this channel. And I always never understood why we could not vote online. So I reached out to the CEO of votes and I got him on the show and I got a bunch of questions and he's got a ton of answers. So let's jump right in. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the office. For a cue of the day, this is just a little pet project of mine. It doesn't come from a particular person, but it's a question I've always had. If I can open up a bank online, if I can find my soulmate online, if I can pay my taxes and do everything from which online, why can't I vote online, especially with blockchain technology? So I reached out to votesvoatz.com and the CEO Nimit Sahani came on to answer some questions, which I got to tell you. I think this is a fantastic reason to use blockchain. So Nimit, thanks so much for stopping by. Let's start with tell us about votes and who you're trying to actually target to help out to get people to vote right here in the US of A. Thank you. Thank you, Rob, for having us here. So votes is the youngest elections company in the country. We got started purely by accident a few years ago after winning a hackathon at South by Southwest. And since then, our focus has been to help voters who've traditionally been disenfranchised by the traditional voting process, so deployed military personnel, citizens who are living overseas, voters with disabilities, et cetera. And it's a mobile focus platform. So you have to download a smartphone application on your iPhone or Android device and then go through a strict vetting process. And only then do you get access to about it. Gotcha. So this is an online voting. It is through an app, correct? Okay. Yeah. So it is different from the traditional ways where people vote on a web browser. This requires you to have a smartphone app before your Android device. Right. So you are focusing on the disenfranchised or the people that can't get to the voting stations. So I pulled up this information. It's available on votes.com. I will link this in the description of the video. So disabilities, soldiers who are deployed overseas, Native Americans, which I found was interesting because there was a little topic we talked about how it's difficult to get voter registration or the documentation needed because they do not have traditionally accessible addresses. So I'm like, oh, it's pretty good. I'd like to hear that. Utility voters, I think right now with COVID-19, it's important that they're not allowed around a ton of people. I got to tell you, I just voted yesterday and it was like this. It was a ton of people. In El Paso we call it un bolo de hinte. It's a ton of people concentrated and that's not good for elderly people or people who are immunocompromised. Then you talked about caregivers and people who are busy and then also targeted by voter suppression. So talk about that real quick, targeted by voter suppression because that's going to be a topic people are going to bring up. Absolutely. So we've seen a lot of news stories this year about certain groups of voters having to travel long distances to get to a polling station, not have easy access to postal draw boxes, things like that. And some of these same demographics have one of the highest smartphone penetrations in the country. And so they could really benefit from a remote voting technology which follows all the process, gets them verified. And so that's one of the areas we hope to focus on and help citizens who have once again challenges with the traditional voting process. Yeah and so when I went to go vote, the line was very long. There was a ton of people right there. And all I'm thinking to myself is look, I got my grandson at home. He's with my wife. She's going to need help. I need to go back home and do a couple of things for not just my YouTube channel, but for my other businesses. And that's just me. So I can only imagine how other people are in line, how much time do they actually have. And I think there was a statistic out that talked about as far as US citizens, I don't know how this is globally, but in the USA, we're looking at around half of American citizens or 40%. Just do not vote at all. I think this is one of those reasons, just a topic. It is and it's just really unfortunate that citizens have to wait. In some cases we've seen, you know, for numerous hours just to get access to that ballot. I think that's something that needs to be changed and corrected. And one of the ways you can do it is by taking advantage of some of these new technologies. That's right. So let's break in my man. Let's see what we got. So tell us how this all works. So if you go to votes.com, there is a nice little video. It's about a minute and a half or so. I'm not going to play it. I'm going to do the faster version so Nimit can bring us through how this all works. So first of all, the very first step, this app that you have to download. First of all, how do you get the app? Is there some kind of paperwork that you have to fill out or go to some place to actually get this app so you can download it to actually verify and protect the voter identity? Like it says here in step one, how does it all work? Sure. It's a very traditional app registration voting process. It's the same as you would register to vote absentee for a postal ballot. So you apply to your county clerk or your local election clerk. There's a standard form. There's also a federal form. And in that you indicate your preference. So if you want to vote by mail, you check box. If you want to vote by online option, you can choose this. Some jurisdictions will specifically say mobile. So then what happens is the jurisdiction does a little bit of vetting to make sure you're eligible. And then you receive an invitation to download the app on your iPhone or Android device. So you proceed with a mobile number and an email that needs to match the information you've already provided to the county or your local election clerk. And then the app will prompt you to take a picture of a government issued photo ID. So you can take, you can use a driver's license, state ID or you're in a passport. You have to do front and back for the license and the state ID. And then it prompts you to do a live video selfie so you move your face, you know, blink your eyes. So it wants to know you're a real person that you're not impersonating somebody. Similarly, it checks your picture with the picture on your ID. And then it checks the data on your ID to make sure your ID is not expired. And that data matches the voter registration system. And then the barcode and the holograms to make sure that it's not a fake document. So this typically takes for a large number of users less than a minute. If there's any discrepancy, then you might have to wait a little bit longer. And then once this process is completed, your identity is essentially tied to your mobile device and it's protected with the help of your biometric, which would be a fingerprint or a face ID or, you know, a variable as well. And then all the documents you've provided are deleted for privacy purposes because we don't want to store them. We don't want to increase the risk. And they're never shared with anybody else. And at that point, you're kind of ready to receive your mobile ballot. And so you get a notification and then you can mark your ballot, sign the affidavit on the screen and proceed. You get a receipt to verify your vote. And the jurisdiction also gets an anonymous receipt. And on election day, they're actually able to print out a paper ballot, which is what gets tabulated. And then there's a very comprehensive forced election audit process where any citizen can audit the election and make sure that everything turned out okay. Perfect. So we'll break those down in detail. But when I was going through the whole process yesterday to vote, I thought to myself, because I had to show them my ID and they wrote it down. And there was a ton of people and they were kind of rushing the whole process. And when you have so many people in the whole process, there is human error. So I thought to myself, you know, I remember having a fake ID when I was a kid so I can go drink and it was fantastic, right? So I thought, well, I mean, couldn't you just, you know, make a real quick fake ID? Because I mean, these guys aren't experts who are at the polling. They are just average citizens who have volunteered. So I think to myself, well, I mean, I could really do this. And if we're talking about, you know, voter fraud and things like that, how easy could it be, especially when everything's rushed? So that makes a lot of sense to me. So let's break it down again. Let me share my screen. Let's go over that, these steps. So you talked about this, the whole thing all the way through. Secures all submitted ballots. So when you put it in and it goes through the whole process, it is stored. Where is this stored? Where does this go to? So essentially what happens is the system uses distributed ledger technology. We commonly know this blockchain technology. And every oval you mark on the device, which essentially maps to every oval you were hand marking a paper ballot, gets stored as a transaction on the blockchain network. It's anonymized so nobody can reverse the engineer by looking at the blockchain data and say, this is you, Rob, or this is your vote. All they would know is this is for a specific election. And then anything beyond that they would not know. Only you would be able to audit your individual vote. And as a citizen, you can audit the entire election by looking at anonymous, voter records, anonymous receipts, anonymous data on the blockchain, but you'd never be able to find out the offer voter. And in addition, the smartphone application also does a whole set of checks. So it makes sure your device is secure. So if you have malware on it, or if you if you're running an unsafe Wi-Fi network, it'll actually stop you from voting and will take you through a cure process. And once you fix those anomalies, then you'd be able to submit your ballot. So it does go over and beyond what traditional online systems have been able to do. Yeah, so two things. When I cast my ballot, that's it. It went to the system. It's in a black hole. I can't check it afterwards. I certainly am not going to be able to check this during this election. That's for sure. So you're telling me that I can go through and I can look at I can audit it on the blockchain, kind of like how you can audit things on like EtherScan. You can take a look at all the transactions that were done for my Ethereum wallet, and you can say, oh, here is my code or here is my hex key. So I can look at that and go, OK, that's my vote. I definitely voted for Brock Pierce for president or whoever it was. And then I can come back and go, OK, this is this is good. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you talk about DLT, distributed technology and blockchain. Is this an open source? Is it decentralized or centralized more so like an IBM type of blockchain? So it is open source because it is using the hyper ledger framework, which was originally created by IBM and then open source. And now the Linux foundation runs it. And what we've done is we've created a very elections focused network. So it is a public network where it's permission. And the reason it's permissioned is there are certain groups of entities who are permitted to interact with that network. Anybody can see, but to interact with it, you either have to be an eligible voter. So you'd have to have access through your mobile device or you have to be an auditor who can audit the election or a node operator. And the reason we went that route instead of just using a fully permissionless network is because of the way elections are conducted in the US. Jurisdiction, I mean, blockchain by itself is still very new when it comes to elections and explaining to officials that your Bitcoin or Ethereum node is potentially running in unfriendly parts of the world is a very difficult conversation. So early on we were based on the feedback advice that for legal constraints, for policy constraints, the network has to be governed in a jurisdiction where the election is happening. They don't need to run the network. So the government doesn't need to operate the nodes. The nodes are run independently. The government can participate. And so it's a hybrid model. And I think it's kind of one of the ways you can introduce this technology in a highly regulated space. And over a period of time, we may get to a state where it becomes completely permissionless. But I don't think that's where we could have begun. So right now I can hear everybody groaning on my channel because that's usually how it goes. And I was, when I had done a little bit of research on it, I go, I think this is going to be based on IBM. I think it is going to be permission. I thought about it first and like, that's kind of a bummer. But then I realized one thing. And then as we have to start somewhere in a minute, and what you just said was correct to get this to actually get off the ground, to have this done from a permission list, you know, totally decentralized, will be very tough to do. And we'd be looking at another 10 years. So why don't we fight this revolution from the inside instead of going from the outside in? I think it's a great start. I think we all know where we want it to be, which is that is what it is. So I will just say this, if I could use it right now and vote, it's way better than what we have right now. And I will go for that all day long. So let me know what you think in the comments section and I can hear it. But let's move on. So let me share my screen again. Let's go back and so we got this, you explain that perfectly. There was a question. When you said that you can have, since it's permissioned and you have the auditors there, can they change anything? And if they do change anything, just to verify. There is a record of all changes, correct? So the auditor cannot change anything. The auditor's role is to view, because if you allow changes, then it creates a whole set of complications here. I mean, by definition, the network is tamper-resistant, right? And so you can only append, which means you can add new stuff. You cannot change anything. If there is a malicious entity and they try to change something, they will get kicked out of them. It will be, it would be really, really hard. Like everybody in the network would have to, you know, collude and ignore a change. So it's practically close to impossible to do. And that's that's useful from an election's perspective. And I'll give you a good example. There are jurisdictions which allow people to vote multiple times and only the last vote counts. So a good example is Estonia. And it's a very useful feature because one of the concerns a lot of the skeptics have about remote voting, online voting is that because you're voting in a private space, maybe there's there's a risk to coercion or being forced to vote a certain way for some people, right? For other people, it's safer. So you could go either way. But in that scenario, what the government of Estonia does is lets you vote as many times as you want. And so if you voted once under duras, you can come back and vote in the evening or the other day and only your last vote will count. And so if you do that on a on a on a blockchain based network, you'd have a record of all those attempts and only the last one will count. And I think for transparency purposes, that's how you wanted. You don't want a previous attempt to get overwritten. So we like that approach. In the U.S., very few jurisdictions actually allow you to change your absentee vote, some do. And the process there is you have to give up your anonymity. So when you vote once, you get a receipt. Receipt has an anonymous ID. And let's say for for any reason, you made a mistake and you want to change your vote and your jurisdiction allows you to then you have to approach the jurisdiction, provide. It's ID, they then go dig up the receipt. And basically then at that point, they know how you voted. So you've given up your anonymity, but then you get a second second attempt and then you can vote again and only your second attempt would count. But most jurisdictions don't allow that. And a blockchain based network actually helps that because you would have a record of all the attempts and you can make sure only the last one counts. Yeah, Nimit, I when you said that to me personally, that's not a fan of that whatsoever. I mean, in Estonia, somebody from Estonia or either they are found there. They said, hey, we've been we've been voting since 2005 and we don't know why I can't come over here. And I was like, I don't know, I can ask Nimit this. So one of those. So to actually vote again and again and again seems like sounds like a nightmare. Now, if you're talking about voter coercion, and this is one of the things that we're going to talk about. This is in a little document of election fraud. And one of those things was talking about voter coercion. So you can either get voter coercion at the polls, potentially, or you can vote a coercion at home. Nothing is going to be safe or nothing's going to be perfect. So we I guess kind of take the good and the bad. And hopefully, you know, we have a less of a percentage at home. You know, maybe the wife is bowing the husband, both this part, this way, who knows. Yeah, the technology does not have a perfect solution to coercion, but you can, you know, mitigate policy and through best practices and obviously legal measures and so it cuts both ways. There are people who would feel safer voting at home and there are people who would feel safer voting in a polling location. So you have to cater to both scenarios. I think this comes down to a point that a subscriber made. And and I kind of jump in all over the place and I apologize. But he did say he goes, if we have this technology and we're able to do this, then maybe a politician will say, hey, this isn't fair for the disenfranchised, the poor and the downtrodden because they can't afford smartphones. So I guess if you have it that way, I mean, does it really make a difference to me personally? I think it frees up a lot of the congestion at the polls. So if you have, let's say you have just just 25 percent of people that vote using this app. Well, that's 25 percent of people that aren't mine and we can get into the polls and we can get things done and off we go. That's just my my thinking. Yeah, absolutely. I think the really important thing to note is nobody is going to be forced using a smartphone like it's all about voter choice. So let's give voters as many choices as they want. If you want to go vote in person and it's safe for you to do so, please, you should have that option. If it's safe for you to do so in your jurisdiction to vote by mail, you should have that option. And similarly, if you are eligible, you should have an option to vote on your smartphone as well and let the voter choose and people will make the best choice for themselves. And so that way you're not forcing anybody to use a certain method or a certain technology. Absolutely. That's the truth. OK, so moving on, I think we talked about this. I thought it was a fantastic idea about biometrics, your thumb, your face, your kind of like KYC, AML type of thing, where they actually take a picture of your government ID. I mean, in the crypto space, we're already doing that anyhow. Well, most of us, not all of us. So we would be well versed in this one. So makes sense. And then so you submit the vote, it goes over. We know that works out. And then, of course, we talked about the audits and it's on the blockchain IBM permission. We'll work on that later. Sure. OK, off we go. And a really important thing to note here is for a US elections case, the middle case, it's actually generating a paper ballot because that's how our traditional process works. Right. When you vote in person, you vote by mail is the paper ballot which gets counted. There's no kind of, you know, other tally. And so to kind of smoothly integrate with that legacy system, this system also generates a paper ballot. And so there's no digital tabulation until that paper ballot is scanned and tabulated just as if you had voted in person. So that's really important to note because it's another point of auditing. You have the voter receipt, you have the printed paper ballot and then you have the data on the blockchain. And so there are multiple points to check and audit the system. Yeah, I hope it would at some point go to offer that paper and just do everything on the blockchain. But who knows? I think it's and one thing I want to make mention again, I said this before and I'll say it again. What I think is great about this is to be able to not only vote, but then check your vote on the blockchain and go, OK, who did I vote for? There's the person, there's all the people and it's all right there. So you can do it right after you vote during the election and then right after the election. Because right now when I just voted, I have no idea where it goes. And I hope that it gets the right people and that's the big thing. OK, so Nimit, thanks. And then talk to us about this. This was smartphone app voting versus web browser. And we've talked a lot about these things, but just we'll rush to this or we'll we'll go with this and tell me what your thoughts are. So secure enclave. So is most of us aware people have been trying to do online voting for the last 15 plus years and no none of the attempts have really gone mainstream primarily because of certain key security concerns. What has changed in the last few years is the advancement of certain technologies. One of them is smartphone hardware. So our smartphones now come with what's what's called a secure elements. These are like secure hardware processors, which are able to secure our digital keys, our cryptographic information. And that's a game changer because that's not available to a web browser on most computers. And so that enables a whole new set of security paradigms to be tapped into which a smartphone app can do, but a browser app cannot currently do. Similarly, being able to remotely proof of order, as you saw, you're familiar with the whole KYC process. And then the other really big challenge being if you if you do something on a web browser, there's no way for a remote application to authoritatively detect is your computer safe? Is your browser compromised? Are you running a Trojan on a smartphone app? That has changed as well in the last few years. We are now able to detect if your device is compromised. If you have malware, if you have a suspicious app running, or if you're on unsafe Wi-Fi network, somebody is trying to do a man in the middle attack. So all those things make it really, really kind of a game changer type of situation. Similarly, the use of distributed ledgers where you no longer have to store data in a sequel type database. You can use tamper resistant stores. So even even the operator of the system can no longer change the data. And then the whole idea of providing voters receipts, which they can use audit, you know, use that for an audit purpose. That's also very unique to this system. And that enables every citizen to build trust and transparency into the process without any revealing how you voted. And then another really, really important thing to note is voters with disabilities. There are voters who can hand mark a paper ballot, who can't, you know, use a standard browser application. But with the great improvements, both Apple, Google, Samsung have done on mobile devices now. They can use an accessibility feature. We recently had a blind voter who voted, you know, touch free, hands free. Another voter with a motor disability voted were double tippled taps. So you are now enabling citizens who would otherwise not vote or somebody else had to vote for them, giving them that ability. And it ensures if you want the ability to, you know, prove that only one person can vote on one device in some cases. And so that's overall some of the kind of key advantage of using a smartphone app based system over a traditional browser based system. Got it. So you covered everything, I think. That last one was the big one to me. One device, one vote. And this was the big question for a lot of my subscribers. So that is the whole thing. One device, one vote, not like Estonia. We can vote 20 times, whatever else. So I'm good with that. OK. So this is how it all works. Sounds fantastic. Let's get to the negatives. So talk to us about this one. So this was it was a article in ABC News or NBC News. Vote smartphone voting app has significant security flaws MIT researchers say. And I'm just going to sum it all up like this. So this was February 13, 2020. Recent version of smartphone voting app has been used in limited capacity in federal elections across four states. We'll talk about it in a bit. Researchers, no, excuse me. Researchers have found significant security flaws. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT study has found. Researchers did not say they found evidence that the app has been hacked. But they said the vulnerabilities could have been exploited and they state. We find that votes has vulnerabilities that allow different kind of adversaries to alter, stop or expose a user's vote. So this is what's going on. So talk to us about what exactly happened because when I read into this and another article, it talked about how they had used an older version of your app and there was issues there. But then there was something else. So Nimit, tell us what's going on here. Absolutely. So I would start by saying that criticism of, you know, any attempt to do online or Internet-based voting is not new, right? It's been around for the last but a part of two decades. In this scenario, the attempt was to use an older version of our Android application. They were not able to get into the system. They were not able to do any kind of transaction or do a vote. And so they only had access to a very small piece of the infrastructure that was also outdated. And they proceeded to make a whole set of assumptions which were theoretical without actually knowing how the rest of the system worked. And we focus on kind of the practical side of the security. Theoretically, we all know no systems are present safe. That's true of our in-person voting system, you know, other systems. But through a set of controls and procedures to detect and mitigate, you can make a system safe enough. And so in the field, we've never had anybody show us that they're able to compromise a vote. We've actually run elections recently this year, which were actually attacked and 100% of attempts to attack the system were blocked and caught and mitigated. And so I think the research side of it is useful, but we also need to focus on the practical side of security because sometimes that varies very significantly from the theory. We appreciate the interest, but I think our focus is more on how to practically secure the system. And we've been very successful. We've done 70 elections and every election has been successful. Every oval has come out okay in the audits. So we feel good about it, but we're constantly improving and trying to make the system better, secure, stay ahead of the adversaries. So it's a work in progress all the time. Sure, look, small business owner, nothing's perfect, right? We aim for excellence and we try to get there as much as possible. And then along the way, we have some pickups. Sure, so another thing is that I think, did you reach out to them afterwards and say, hey, this is what happened, use an older version. You didn't have access to all the data. We'd like you to come back in and do this again, set the record straight. We did, we even offered that, I mean, at the time when the report was published, they chose to stay anonymous, but tried to that. We had approached them on social media, invited them. They did not accept. And then even after the report was published, we have tried to collaborate. We actually have a public bug bounty system. We were the first elections company to launch a bug bounty system. So any researcher can get access to our system. There's a replica test system. You can get a test Android app, test Apple app, and you can do the full vote, do the full verification and give us feedback, help us make the system better. So that's available. We encourage every researcher out there to use it. But so far, the folks who wrote the report haven't shown an interest in doing that. I have to tell you, one of the big things that the subscribers have asked is, do you really think that politicians and the powers that be are gonna let this actually happen? Because to get voting in the hands of everybody, that's a pretty powerful proposition. So there would probably be a little bit of a pushback from some people and maybe an incentive to not have this happen. I'm not saying that's what it is, but in the cryptocurrency world, we know we call this FUD, fear and certainty doubt. And it's spread and it's much easier to spread FUD than to fix a problem. That's all I'm gonna say about that. That's absolutely, I totally agree. I mean, we look at all the attempts that have been made to stop internet voting in the last couple of decades. If you like, if only a fraction of that effort had been made to actually build a technology, we would probably have had a national online voting system by now. And with the fear of a pandemic, it could have helped a lot of people. I mean, just like we went to the moon, it was, you know, there was a national effort. I think this is one of those things where sometimes the criticism, the amount of effort spent in the criticism is strange when you could spend a fraction of that and actually make something which benefits everybody. You're preaching the choir, Nime. You're preaching the choir. So just to continue on with this article, this was interesting to me. It says, while the app has on and gone several private independent security audits, the results have never been made public, which I thought was odd because before I came in here, I did a little research myself. I looked in your FAQ section, audits and testing, which will bring us to all the different audits that have been done. You can click on those and you can see the actual audits that have been done by different organizations. This is one from Utah Republican Party. I think it's in, I think I want to say page 10 or page nine, where it talks about. Where do we go? Audit overview. Cyber Security Center work with the Utah GOP party to recruit poll workers to assist with the poll. Audit may open. The audit for this political convention includes viewing the ballot receipts, generate for each voter. This enables auditors to confirm. One audit reviewed 140 ballots, 48 ballots and so on and so forth. Key findings. We do not find any issues with the audit that would lead to concern that there was any internal or external tampering of the results. And here's another one that I found. Again, on your website, talk about, there was the Denver mobile voting pilot, the same type of thing, found no issues. And then this was from the Department of Homeland Security. This was a summary that you guys had put out and this is what they found. There were some issues and then you talked about how you would correct them and it's all right here. So interesting stuff. I think it is put out there. It's just you have to do a little bit of research on your own end and then go that route. So it makes sense. Let's get into this part here. So I think you answered all our questions so far, but this is what I had a question about, which was what exactly is voter fraud and voter tampering and everything else and what are the problems with voting in general? So this was a report that was put out just about a year ago or so and just talks about the different types of voter fraud. First one, impersonation fraud of the polls, like we just talked about. And Nimit, you said exactly how we could get away from this, right? Biometrics, verification of your ID, video chat or video conference or video recording of you and your eyes and everything else. So it makes sense. False registrations, either a phony name, a real or fake address or a claim residence in a particular jurisdiction where the registered voter does not actually live and is not entitled to vote. How do we fix that? Is that an issue? So there have been significant attempts to help with this. There's actually a multi-state initiative called ERIK and I'd say at least 30 states now are participating in that. And what that requires is the different states and basically their state registration systems to share data. And if every state starts to do this, then you can eliminate this kind of misuse where somebody registers in one jurisdiction and then maybe has a residence in another jurisdiction and tries to go do the same thing over there and through this sharing mechanism in a secure manner, you can eliminate that risk. So there are attempts to do that. It's not nationwide yet, but I would encourage people to look at ERIK is one such project where multiple states are participating and it's one of the good ways things are improving. Nimit, how easy, not how easy, yeah, how easy could you do it? Let's say that someone came to you and go, Nimit would want you to do nationwide and we want the votes app and we wanted to use it all the way through. First of all, it's a lot of work, let's just be honest, but how easy would it be to weed out different people, especially if it's connected to your social security number, your ID, your address and everything else for someone to go, no, I'm gonna vote in Florida, no, I'm gonna vote in Texas. And you got two different people in two different areas, but you have all their information, especially with you guys, how easy would it be just to say, no, no, you can't do that. Yeah, so one of the challenges in the U.S. is because elections are not really conducted in government, it's all the states. So it's all happening and we also don't have a formal national ID, so to speak, which is one of the differences in most of the countries where you have some form of a national ID. So here we have to default to state level documents, which is the driver's license or a state ID and people have passports, but only a third of the country has passports. So you can't really use a passport universally as well. And so what that does is it requires logical segregation of election setups at the state level and many cases at the county and the local level. And so the scenario described, essentially you would have to register to be an eligible voter in more than one jurisdiction. And then as soon as you register in one jurisdiction, when you try to register in one jurisdiction because that data sharing is happening, that would block that attempt. And so having that kind of a uniformity in terms of synchronization of the voter registration would prevent that from happening. Sure. Yeah, and actually as I was saying and I was listening to your answer, I was like, I can hear people right now going, there is no way I'm gonna give online information to a big brother to watch and monitor me. So we get that one. All right. Yeah, that's a fair point. And I think that since privacy is key here, even though you are scanning your ID, you're taking a picture, you're revealing personally identifiable information, but we actually delete that. We are not storing your ID, we're not storing your picture perpetually. It's only used to verify you. And then once you're verified and tied to your device, we no longer need it unless you delete the app or you go to a new phone or you change your address or things like that. And so I think that the model there is very privacy focused. This data is not shared with anybody, it's not used for any kind of marketing purpose. And so we definitely need to find that fine balance where we verify the voters, but at the same time ensure that the privacy and concerns are not violated at all. Yeah, you know what, start statewide, go from there. Probably just statewide. I'm not gonna delve into that anymore. So thank you for that one. So then we talked about duplicate voting, that's we can't do that, especially with this system. This is a big one, absentee balance, fraudulent use of absentee balance. Well, this would totally eliminate that issue if we can have somebody when they register, use biometrics, face ID, their actual ID, as opposed to just mailing it to somebody's house, whoever fills it out, fills it out and then returns it. Absolutely, yeah, this would definitely help against that. And also kind of prevent people from trying to vote more than once, because once you've requested an absentee ballot, that kind of flag gets marked on the state system. We try to show up in person on election day and try to vote again, not issue ballot because you've already technically voted. And so yeah, that definitely would help prevent a lot of the fraud which is possible in the normal absentee voting scenario. Yeah, I'll get the buying votes last, but illegal assistance at the polls, we talked about that. Sometimes people want to do it over there, they want to do it in the home, but there is voter coercion, we could say. Ineligible voting, well, this wouldn't happen because we have to do all the different steps. Altering the vote count, we talked about that because of everything's on the blockchain, you can verify it. And especially, this is what I think, if you are an average citizen and you would, you say, well, you can wait in line for two hours or you can double check your vote later. There is one extra step, just double check your vote later. I'm gonna save you a bunch of time. So go with that. And then the ballot petition fraud, which is forwarding the signatures, we can't do that. The only thing that I can say is buying votes, I don't know how you would get around this because you're gonna buy a vote, you're gonna buy a vote and that's that. At-risk exists in our current system as well, right? If somebody that way, that risk is there as well, this technology cannot eliminate the risk of that or no risk of coercion completely. It can provide some mitigations, but I think that problem is solved through policy, through voter education, through legal methods. So that's one of the things technology cannot solve completely. Of course. Okay, and then the last to finish up because we're going a little bit long, I apologize. This was just from all the subscribers and I asked them, what would you wanna hear about? So we talked about how are the votes secure? Because it's on the blockchain, right? How are your platform hack-proof? Nothing's hack-proof right now, we're getting to that point, but like you said, how many different elections have you done so far? Did you say 17 or 7B? So we have 70 successful elections so far. Out 11 have been government elections. So our first government election was in 2018 with the state of West Virginia in their state primary two counties. And since then, we've continued to do that. We also work geopolitical parties do their internal elections and convention voting in several states. So there is some element of bipartisan support and in the presidential election right now, system is being used by counties in a couple of states for in a small measure, it's focused to voters, citizens overseas, voters with disabilities as well. Awesome, okay. And then that's pretty much across the board the same type of thing. We had over 50 votes here, but I think we had almost about 500 there. And then questions, let's see if we answered them. This was from John, I gotta tell you. I would support this as an option, but how many years there will be for the general public would adopt it as they would probably be suspicious of not being able to stay anonymous and have no idea about blockchain. So we talked about that about the anonymity, you don't store any information. The big thing that I think would really help is education. And that's why we're here, right? To teach people that if there isn't, there's anonymousness for this, it is on the blockchain, it is distributed technology. Right now it's centralized, maybe we'll decentralize later. And he says also certain politicians would say it would disadvantage the poor because not everyone has access, which is a lie, the internet. And then, which is a great point, but you had talked about something about smartphones. So the disenfranchised in the United States, below poverty level or at a poverty level, what is the percentage of people who have smartphones? Yeah, there's an interesting statistic. There's a link to the study on our website as well. So some of the most traditionally disenfranchised communities, folks who have walked the longest to get to a polling station or don't have access to the postal mailboxes, actually have the highest, some of the highest smartphone penetration. And so it's close to 90%. And so I think there is an opportunity here to use technology to bring access to people who don't have access with the traditional methods. And that's happening in several other parts of the world and the smartphone has kind of revolutionized that aspect. So definitely it's something to keep in mind. And just to add to the other aspect about the anonymity, we should remember that every overview mark is stored on the blockchain, but your identity isn't. So there's no way for anybody to reverse engineer and say that to vote. So that's also something really important to keep in mind. Perfect. And then this one we kind of answered and I just want to reiterate. So this is from Novo. He said, this is the idea of solution for the question is why would political parties be in favor of getting rid of voter fraud when it helps them? And that's why I'm glad Nimit is doing this because I don't want to do that. He's got an uphill battle ahead of him and good luck to you, Godspeed soldier. Thank you. Thank you for having us here. Yeah. And then are they going to support anonymity? We answered that. And then this is from genetics. He just talks about how they're going to commit voter fraud or how we're going to deal with, this is for absentee ballots, you know, sending out to dead people, people in the household filling it out. And we just talked about how that works. So this one a little bit long, but it's one of my pet projects. I like to talk about as far as voting. And I just want to say thanks, Nimit, for coming on to the show. I really appreciate it. Hopefully in the future, this will be the next big thing. Just going to be a little bit wild for everybody to catch on, just like Bitcoin cryptocurrency assets, just can take a while in education. No, absolutely. I think it'll take a little bit of piloting this very slowly and thoughtfully. Hopefully in a few years, but we'll have access to it. So thank you. All right, thanks so much. And that's it. Let's jump back. So look, that's it. Thanks for sticking with me through the whole video. I know it was long. And again, it's not a very sexy topic per se. You can't invest a ton of money into it, make a ton of money, but it is one of those projects that could change everything. So thanks again for watching it, one of my pet projects. And if you liked these types of videos, more so on the news side, that's going to be two months going to pop up on your left and right. I'll let YouTube do their magic. That is it for today. Thanks so much. See you on the next one.