#140: Technology and Democracy, Rebuilding the TRUST, 2028 Mid Terms w/ Ramon Perez

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I welcome former military officer, AI expert, and executive director of the Digital Democracy Project, Ramon Perez. We discuss his role at the DDP, AI and democracy in the modern world, congressional scorecards, deficiencies in the two-party system, gerrymandering, reimagining democracy, mobile voting, silencing voters, cryptographic tokens, benefits of AI in democracy, and giving voters the power. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hey everybody and welcome back to Divulgence. Today we have a former military officer, also an expert in AI, and he's uh right now he's the executive director of the Digital Democracy Project, which we will uh of course get into today. Uh please help me welcome Roman sorry, Ramon Perez. Ramon, how are you, my friend?

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Yeah, yeah. Great, Jordan. Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

So um before we jump into um what you're doing now, maybe just give us a little bit of your background because uh yeah, military, tech, AI, democracy, all that stuff. I'm sure, I'm sure you have somewhat of an interesting backstory. So uh whatever you have comfortable sharing.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I was a military officer for about 13 years, um, served in Iraq, Afghanistan, uh, did some tours in South America, mostly focused on um special operations, counterterrorism, but I was uh it was my job to uh basically find uh Al Qaeda leadership or senior Taliban commanders so that a uh a SEAL team or a ranger team could could go and and capture them. So that was my time in service. I I left um active duty uh to go back to graduate school and then got into technology as my full-time job in the private sector. So I work as a technology consultant and and focus on AI and machine learning. So I've done that now for the last 12 years. Um so what we you know used to call data mining, then we called machine learning and we called data science, and now a lot of it is AI, you know, different names, but for the similar techniques and tools. Uh, but it's exciting to see where the industry's been going. Obviously, it's it's a huge part of our lives now, and it's a big part of what we're doing with Digital Democracy Project. I think that uh yeah, I know we'll we've got a lot of time today to get into it, but really trying to use some of these tools to to reimagine democracy for the 21st century um is all is what we're all about in our organization.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Cool, man. Uh one other question. Um and it and it really makes no difference to me. Um, it just helps me get an idea of maybe where you're coming from sometimes. Do you do you have a um a political affinity, uh affiliation, excuse me? You know, do you support one person or the other? Because uh, although I am Canadian, I uh I do take great interest in uh what's going on around the world, and I think I think if you want to know what's going on, I think the US is the best place to start. So I do take a good interest in that. Um, but I'm I'm definitely someone who shoots down the middle. Um, so if I'm talking, you know, if I'm talking good about one person, it definitely doesn't mean I like the other person. And if I'm talking bad about the other person, it definitely doesn't mean I like the other person, so to speak. Uh, I think everyone is there's goods and bads with everyone. Um I think that's something we'll get into in another time, but um, yeah, where do you kind of stand?

SPEAKER_00 3:15

If you don't mind me asking, I no, no, no, it's great. I think it's an important question, too, given the the nature of the work that we do. I guess I could say that I am uh firmly convinced that the two-party system has failed us. I have been a member of I've been a registered Republican, I've been a registered Democrat, I've voted for uh Republicans and Democrats over the time. I've I've been a registered libertarian. Um and I consider myself an independent, really, because not because my political beliefs have changed so much or because, as people will say, oh, I just can't make up my mind. No, it's just that I feel like there are good ideas. There are good ideas to be had um in regardless of political party. And unfortunately, we are sort of crammed into this left versus right dichotomy, which I believe is an entirely artificial construct. I mean, if we had five political parties in the United States, the media would frame things in five different points of view, in the same way you hear people talking in Germany and the German media about how they discuss politics, right? It's we unfortunately have a first past the post system and a two-party process that that is, I think, um, creating this sense of tribalism that really doesn't reflect where most people's heads are at when it comes to politics.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Right on, man. Well, like I said, it it it wouldn't have mattered to me one way or the other, but uh that's not to say that I really love and respect your answer. So uh yeah, man, I'm really happy that we were able to connect. And um, yeah, so that's uh cool, man. So uh where should we be? I guess I guess maybe we should we should start digging our teeth in with the DDP uh Digital Democracy Project. Uh so when did you start there or when did it when did it become and start walking us through that, my friend, because uh very interesting to that.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

Big motivator for me was 2021 because we had both we had January 6th and we had people storming the Capitol. We also had uh a lot of these uh you know, we had protests in the city of Portland where essentially I guess you could say an anarchist group basically toppled the city government and and pushed them out and sort of ran the show for several months until somebody got killed, and then suddenly the police department, you know, and the and the city council took back over. And it kind of gave me this sort of queasy feeling that we had spent 20 years trying to build democracies in the Middle East and Afghanistan and Iraq and other places in the world, only to watch it start to fall apart here at home. And and when I spent the energy to dig into why people feel this sense of frustration that they are no longer being heard, regardless of what your political beliefs are, people were checking out of the process or turning to violence or the belief that they, you know, whether it's you you want to support dictatorship or anarchy, whatever it is, people are believing that democracy is no longer suiting their needs. It's not it's no longer accountable to what they what they need. And it convinced me to, even though I was no longer wearing the uniform, I wanted to continue to serve in some capacity. And what I had been spending my private sector time doing was working with technology for Fortune 500 companies. And I said, well, why can't we just use the same tools to reimagine American democracy for the 21st century? Why are we, why are we still um dealing with sort of the 18th century architecture in a 21st century information environment where people are increasingly um have access to tons of uh of whether it's good or bad or biased or not? They have access to a lot of information where when the founding fathers originally wrote the Constitution, it took you two weeks to get a letter from Philadelphia to Boston. It's it's we live in a different world, but the tools of our democracy really have not adapted. And that's what we you know set out to do. So the whole concept with Digital Democracy Project is we're using mobile voting software, which is where you can vote from your phone. And by the way, Ontario is a leader in this now. I'll I can talk to you about that a little bit more in a minute. Yeah. But where you can vote from your phone, and it was originally developed for military voters overseas who to cast an absentee ballot when they were deployed or they're on a submarine under the ocean or they're in a special forces unit in the Horn of Africa, and you just you can't get an absentee ballot, but we wanted them to be able to sit to vote. So this that's what this software was developed for. You have to verify your identity using a photo ID that matches your uh selfie. You have to be on the voter file. Um you know, you have to prove authenticity throughout the process. There's pretty significant encryption software to prevent hackers, uh, foreign um intelligence services from manipulating the results so that you know that the vote that's cast is the vote that's counted. So I said, Well, I got connected to the CEO of votes that makes uh the software, they're based out of Boston, that's V O A T Z, and they do a lot of work in Canada, as I say. Uh, but I got connected to them and I said, Well, wait a minute, if you can do all of these things, if you can prove that this person is a real citizen and a resident of the state, and you there's this whole blockchain back end, so it's tracking the votes, and there's no way that a single developer could maybe manipulate the votes in transit. If you could do all of those things, then why do we have to wait every few years for people to have a say in their government? Why couldn't we do something like the Netflix of government, you know, government on demand, and we can use this technology to let people have a continuous mechanism for having a say on politics? So that's what we started doing. In 2021, we uh we we signed agreements with votes. We're a nonprofit organization, but we you know we signed agreements for they're our main technology partner, and we started building the website in 2022, and then by 2023, we went live with uh the Florida legislative session, which is where I you know I grew up is in Florida, where we instead of you know, we're not a supervisor of elections, so we're not asking people to vote in an election. What we do instead is use the same infrastructure and say, we'll load legislation as it's being debated in the Capitol, and you can have a say on whether or not you agree that this bill is a good idea or not. And at the very beginning, we just provided people access to read the bill, you know, form an opinion, and then vote in the app. And over the course of time, we started adding in a lot of AI to the process where at first we were just saying, hey, here's the bill, read the bill. But for a lot of people, they'd come back and say, Well, okay, this is written by lawyers. It's very difficult to understand what AI has given us is the ability to translate the bills into plain English so that it's very easy for people to understand what the legislation actually does? How does it impact me, my life, my community, my state, my country, and then form an educated opinion on some of this legislation, which is incredibly esoteric. I mean, it's it all almost intentionally obfuscates what it's doing, and AI gives us the ability to pull back the curtain by summarizing the legislation and then helping people feel informed about the bill and then uh then vote in the app. But then what we do is people vote in the app. We because we know that they've been verified against the voter file, we get the voter files from the state, we vote, verify their photo ID. We can't, it's a secret ballot, so we cannot see how they vote, but we can report out the aggregate results by district on uh on our website. So if you go to our website, every bill you'll see as people are voting, the districts light up with how many people voted in that particular district. So a legislator can say, Well, this is what my voters, people who I know are registered voters, this is what they want on this particular bill, and they can get that insight before they cast a ballot in the Capitol. So they they know going in which lever to pull based on what their district wants. But we also provide, you know, you can see the value for a legislator is basically free public polling, right? Which they normally pay a lot of money for. Absolutely. But the value for, yeah, but the value for the voter is at the end of the session, we then compare what the voters want in the app and what the legislators actually vote on on the floor. So we can say, well, look, your district told you this is what they wanted. Did you actually do what you were told? And over the course of hundreds of bills, you get a really clear trend line to say, uh, does this person actually do a good job representing that district? And so you can go on our website now and you can see scorecards that we've produced that we just actually announced on July 4th for 435 members of Congress and 100 senators. Um, for the the places where people, where we have active voters participating, you'll see what did the districts want and how did the legislators vote on every bill, such as the Iran War Powers Resolution, the Epstein files, the one big beautiful bill, all this marquee legislation, along with a variety of things, cryptocurrency regulations, et cetera, and you get a real sense of which legislators are doing a good job of representing their districts or their states, um, and which ones are not. Now, obviously, um we're early days, we're uh a nonprofit, and we're all volunteers, software developers, organizers, legislative policy folks. So it's gonna take time to get the kind of scale where we can put real pressure on legislators, but that's the vision. We're using technology to give people real transparency and access and accountability like we've we've never had before.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Wow, man. Um I love that. Uh I really like that. I feel like I feel like just the thinking behind all that, um, it sounds like you have a group of people that are definitely trying to move in the proper direction um for democracy, for citizens, for the country, for for everything. It's um it's it seems like. Um before we start unpacking that, can you just help me a little bit with your your thoughts on you kind of answered some of it, but keeping in mind everything that you mentioned about voting methods? Um, for example, verifying identity, uh, you know, possible interference from intelligence agencies or other countries. Um what do you think is the best method of methods for uh let's say for a presidential election or the midterms? Um because I I'm curious I'm curious for that for obvious reasons, and then of course, there's always the the um when it comes to Donald Trump and elections, he seems to or or anything, he seems to flip-flop and say crazy things, and you know, he always seems to put you know, mail in voting is illegal and and phone in this kind of voting is illegal, and and you and that kind of voting is illegal, or this kind of voting is okay. You know, so what are your thoughts on you know what is the best methods of methods for you know a very important election?

SPEAKER_00 14:50

Yeah, I mean, I think that you want to give people options because you're gonna find that some people will immediately gravitate to the idea of mobile voting. Oh, I can sit on my couch, I don't have to go to the polling booth. I mean, that's hey, that's cool. Um, it it was originally um it was originally sponsored by a Republican Secretary of State in West Virginia. He did the first pilot of the votes mobile app because it was for military voters overseas who had a hard time getting an absentee ballot through the mail. And it wasn't a partisan thing at all. It was just about serving a particular constituency that is difficult to serve. Um, several other states, you know, which are more blue states or purple states or whatever, have now adopted mobile voting, but predominantly for military voters. Some of them have allowed it for people with certain disabilities or or vision impairments, especially, who have who can use the accessibility features on an iPhone to read out their ballot to them. I think that um, you know, look, Estonia has been voting online for 12, 14 years now, and they've they use blockchain, they use uh cryptographic tokens on a smart chip, on a on a national ID card. They've got a lot of sophistication in what they've built because they were worried about the Russian hackers that live next door to them and who had a lot of interest in manipulating the results of their election. So they they've built a very strong system for doing this type of voting, and even in their system that's been around and it's pretty mature now, not everybody votes online. Some people still like to go and vote in person, and that's fine. Tradition, right? It's tradition, you know.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

They want to feel the environment, they want to. I think a lot of people want to, you know, with the the I voted sticker. I think people want to show people that they are proud to be an American or or they're exactly part of the system, or you know, so absolutely exactly right, exactly right.

SPEAKER_00 16:43

So Ontario is really uh pushing this experiment a lot further by allowing mobile voting for all municipal elections. So something like 55 different cities uh this year are gonna use the votes mobile app for voting in Ontario. Um, so I want to say it's like two million Canadians are gonna have the ability to vote by phone in Ontario, and that's again, they're doing it for municipal elections. Just I think after that, if they're you know, if they feel good about it, they'll try provincial and then you know eventually it may be national or whatever. So I think this is kind of how this grows. You got to gain some trust, doing it at a smaller level, uh and and then expand from there. But you're right, I mean, it's become a political football where in 2018 it was Republicans who were supporting it. Um, then you know, uh all the Dominion voting shenanigans and all that kind of stuff after 2020, it's kind of hard to say where the political wins will line up in the United States. But the the arguments in favor of mobile voting is that you are verifying a selfie scan against a passport or a driver's license. You have a cryptographic token that is stored locally on the device, you have biometrics, so you're using face ID and touch ID on your iPhone or on your Android. Uh, arguably, for the people who are on the right and concerned about illegal voting through absentee ballots, mobile voting is a very good answer to that problem. It provides a much greater level of sophistication and security than the paper absentee ballot system currently does, because you can't necessarily take grandma's phone and vote on her behalf because it checks your face when you try to submit your ballot. And if you're not the same face as the person who's registered to the phone, you can't submit that ballot. I mean, so that's the argument people make about absentee ballots is that once it's out of the hands of the polling location, it's who's to say where it ends up. So um I think I've I've had a lot of conversations with Republicans on in Tallahassee uh in Capitol Hill in Florida and uh or in DC. And I feel like actually a lot of them are open to the idea of mobile voting as an alternative um to absentee ballots, but it's a it's more of a political thing. It's tough for them to stick their necks out right now. So uh we'll see where that goes. I think that it's gonna be to the Canadians, I think, to really uh show us how it's done. Actually, the the government of Mexico used this for their federal election last year. They let uh all Mexican citizens outside of the country have voting by phone as an option for voting in that national election. So um it was something like a million or so people were eligible to vote by phone uh in in that federal election.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Hmm. Is it was it people who like did it include people that may have like literally just went on a trip for a week? No, I think these are mostly better, more structured.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Yeah, these would be yeah, exactly. These would be either dual nationals or people who are on a a green card who are in the United States or Canada or or some other country and they are voting absentee, they're expats essentially. Right. Um, so yeah, they they were given the opportunity to vote by phone. So yeah, so that so Mexico is uh is probably the furthest along in the sense that they've now done it for a national election, but they had it still, it was a segment. It wasn't everybody, it wasn't all Mexican citizens.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Right. Still, I uh the way I see it, if I was someone who I mean, if I was someone who was not included, obviously it you know might be upset, but for the people who were included in that net, uh, you know, you kind of feel like um okay, like you know, they want to hear what I have to say, and my vote matters to them, and they're looking out for me, and so it kind of helps with with that uh you know, with with just laying the uh the um kind of the the friendliness, and uh I guess it helps work towards keeping the system relevant, keeping people able and wanting to vote. Um, I know that's something that will get we'll get into voter disengagement a little bit as well. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I mean I think it's great that as long as you're following um you know protocols to uh make sure that there's no corruption or fraud or anything, then yeah, it's good to be able to offer those options for people who otherwise might not be able to make that vote for whatever reason, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Right. I mean, so Denver had a municipal election where they allowed uh mobile voting and they saw uh that it doubled um voter turnout in that so people who are people who have an easier time voting are more likely to vote.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

So would have known, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:47

Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah, so I think I think there's plenty of evidence that that the tools um can help with voter you know turnout, but the question about voter. Apathy, I would actually say comes back to a lot of what we're trying to do with Digital Democracy Project because the the you still don't still there are structural problems with our political system that have to be overcome, which is 80% of American states are governed entirely by one political party. 92 or 4% of U.S. House districts in the Congress are considered completely uncompetitive. So they're drawn to be safe blue or safe red seats through the process of gerrymandering. We have a lot of states that have closed primaries. So if you're an independent voter, you're not registered with a party, you don't even get to participate in the primary election, which is the main election, because most districts, the general election is completely uncompetitive. Whether it's the um well, and and actually it's worth at the state level legislation legislature, it's often worse because something like 70% of districts go uncontested, where nobody's even running against the incumbent because the district is so heavily gerrymandered, they don't even bother to put up a uh an opponent. Um, so it's it's a mess, and I think people feel that sense that they're not being heard mainly because the system is designed to make sure that they're not being heard. So if you only have to listen to a small sliver of the electorate that votes in a primary, which is about eight to ten percent of voters, you have no incentive to listen to the rest of the people in your district, or the rest of the people in your state, or the rest of people, you know. So that's an that's a structural deficiency in our two-party political system, where you have the people who run for office are the same people who get to write the rules about how to run for office. And that's an inherent conflict of interest. In Florida, we just went through this where the legislature drew new maps for the congressional elections, which are happening this November. So the people who are currently in office drew maps to then run for office six, eight months later. And I think that is that is one of the deep conflicts of interest that exists in our system that allows this type of essentially vote rigging by map rigging. Um, map rigging, not just the maps, but the election laws make it incredibly difficult for independents to run for office, for third-party candidates to run for office, or to raise money. Uh, you can gain, you can you can do a lot if you're in a two-party candidate, you basically are guaranteed a spot on the ballot without even having to raise a lot of um uh, you know, like the number of signed uh petitions you have to get is oftentimes much lower. Um and by by the way, both parties do this. This isn't uh this is not to point fingers at the Republicans or the Democrats because the Andrew Cuomo in New York pulled this to, you know, he basically wiped out the Libertarians and the Working Families Party by raising the signature requirement in order to be able to stay on the ballot as a as a ballot line as a party candidate. So it's both parties using these types of shenanigans to protect themselves from somebody they consider to be a threat from their left or a threat from their right, or just independent independence in general. And uh, and I think that you see now an increasing trend. I think this is the first time we've ever seen in 2026 that we're now past 50% of all Americans. Uh no, excuse me, 50% of Americans under the age of 40, greater than 50% of the Americans under the age of 40 are registered independents. And that's something we had never seen before. So increasingly increasingly younger younger voters are disassociating with the parties entirely, and that the total percentage of Republicans and Democrats across the entire electorate, uh, I think has now dipped below 50% of the electorate with their combined weight. So you now have between independence and third party registrations now outweigh Republicans and Democrats in the United States electorate as a whole, regardless of age and regardless of locality. Interestingly, a state that we think of as a left-leaning state like Massachusetts only has uh 17% registered Democrats and 7% registered Republicans, it's something like 65% or whatever registered independents and third party um registered independents and then and then an extra the what the remaining percentages like third parties. So it's a surprising amount of independence in a state that we think of as a left-leaning state. But this is this is what happens when you control the legislature and you get to draw the maps, right? You don't have to really represent the wide divergence of voter uh desires. And so what we're trying to do with our project is really use technology as an end around a lot of those structural deficiencies to say, well, what if we just put power directly into the hands of the voters and we'll verify that you're a voter, but then you get to have a say on all of these policies, and then you get to see does your legislator actually conform to your beliefs or the beliefs of your community, and then you get to decide uh should you keep that person in office or try somebody else?

SPEAKER_01 27:31

Yeah, I think even though even though people know how tough their lives are and how tough life can be, and how expensive things are, and you know how ridiculous some of these rules and laws and whatever's going on, because they're not seeing this data, or they're not being presented to it in a honest way. On the contrary, they're just if they're paying attention to news and social media, it's likely they're being pumped with disinformation, right? Um, so even though they know how bad things are, they still you still have all these people that are love Trump, or all these people that love Gavin Newsom, or all these people that love whoever, whoever it is, right? When really, um, you know, I personally I I I think I see the game that they're all playing, and I think they're all doing a terrible job, um, to an extent. And I think if they had it their way, they would be doing an even worse job. But they I feel like you know, they get they gotta do some things right so that they can stay in office and do all the bad that they do. Um, so I think things like this would you know could could really help um disrupt the two-party system, um, you know, maybe help balance the the power a little bit here with uh with the citizens, so to speak. Um another thing would be um I feel like law, you know, lobbying and and and payoffs and stuff like that would be greatly uh interrupted as well. And you'd see more people that would have to start making honest decisions based on honest uh supply and demand and and honest uh requirements and and and honest voter um demands.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Right. That's actually that's absolutely right. Because if you know, if you have to speak to an entire electorate rather than just bribing one senator, it's much diff more difficult to get your you don't get that return on investment from lobbying if you have to do a media campaign to say, I want to put lead in your water. Exactly. You got to convince all these people why you should be able to, you know, sell Roundup or whatever with no legal liability, which was one of the you know things that just went through Congress. And all these people are gonna be like, wait a minute, why would you why would we want to allow ourselves to be poisoned and not have any recourse to to defend ourselves in the courts? But if you can bribe one senator on the ways and means committee, you can get this amendment added that goes under the radar. Um, and suddenly you've got you know billions of dollars that you're returning to shareholders. So it's worth it to spend millions of dollars on legislators. In fact, there was a there was a I think a Harvard economist a few years back, probably 10-15 years ago, that actually found that political lobbying actually had something like the best return on investment of any kind of business investment. Uh because you can you can capture the system of rules by which you are governed and squeeze your competitors who don't have the lobbying firepower by writing rules that benefits your products and hurts their products, for example.

SPEAKER_01 30:54

And like when you're when you're like as one person meeting with one person, like let's say, for example, a senator, you're meeting that one senator with like the power and the resources and everything of that company, but he you're meeting him essentially, you're not meeting him as a representative of all these people and and his districts and all, you're essentially meeting with him as as him and as a representative of himself, so that you can grease him up to make decisions that you know benefit him, and you know what I mean? So right um, again, that you know the power balance is really off there, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Exactly. And I think a lot of what we if we if we look at what technology has done well over the last 150 years, oftentimes what it does is it it reduces information asymmetry in the sense that it makes difficult and esoteric information easier to get to and easier to understand. I think that's one of the things that AI is giving us right now that's very powerful. But it also um connects buyers and sellers. If you think about what, you know, Airbnb or Uber or whatever, those types of things, if you take all the middlemen that stand between us and our representative away by just using a mobile app to connect buyer and seller, you essentially everything you just described is all those, all the power brokers in that center are now out of the picture because we can get back to the basics of what we the you know original constitutional founding was designed to be, which is that somebody from the community serves as the modern-day Cincinnatist and is elected to represent that community, goes and travels to Washington on behalf of their district, and then once they do a term or two, they come back and they plow the fields and they go they go back to what they were doing. I mean, and that was a that was the Washingtonian vision, but that has not been what we've seen instead is is more we've developed a system where it is um of campaign finance, of of the lobbying mechanism, of the party politics, where you it's difficult to get access, it's difficult to understand, and as a result, you build a political elite, if you want to call it that, that understands the system and knows how to work the system. Um, and that is something that is difficult to unseat, regardless of who's in the White House or one legislator to the next, um, is that the system of incentives has to change. Without changing the system of incentives, you really don't ever change the outcome. So I I believe that we don't get bad policies because we're bad people or Americans are just lazy or stupid or don't care. That's not what I see. I mean, I see lots of incredibly engaged, intelligent, hardworking people who want to have a say and a process that they believe is broken, and they they don't have a good mechanism because the system of incentives is not designed to give them that mechanism. So yeah, we don't we don't have bad policy because we're bad people, we have bad policy because we have a bad process.

SPEAKER_01 34:14

Yeah, and uh again, I I say like the process is bad, but also the people who have put the people who have put that in place and who continue to make sure it stays in place and who act this way, uh, I think that they're also very culpable in that. So, and I think that this system will um will will touch on that as well, obviously, uh, because they're gonna have to, you know, the there's gonna be a much bigger microscope on their activities and their actions and votes and what they do while they're in office.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

So yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think a lot of if you if you spend a lot of time talking to legislators, especially candidates who are running for the first time or they're like new to the system, what you find is that a lot of them are really motivated for the right reasons. They got into it because there's something that happened in their lives, there's some policy that affected them in some way that really decided they decided I'm gonna put my life on hold and I'm gonna expose myself to all this public scrutiny because I believe in this particular mission and I want to go and push forward these policies, whether whatever it is, whether it's it could be healthcare, it could be whatever your policy issue is, but a lot of them believe that they are Mr. Smith goes to Washington and they get elected, and they find when they get there that a junior congressman in Washington spends 70 to 80 percent of their time dialing for dollars, because that's the expectation that's put on them by the party leadership is go and raise money not just for your next re-election, but for the party, for the caucus, for the for the somebody in some battlegrounds seat somewhere. It's not to serve your constituents. You're gonna vote the way the party whip tells you to vote. You're not really gonna have a say in this process because you're too junior, you don't even have a seat on a committee. And a lot of them, I think, become, you know, very disenfranchised or with with the process themselves. And when I talk to them, I think that they wish they had a better mechanism to just do right by their voters. And that's one of the things that when I talk to legislators, whether it's Republicans or Democrats or independents, especially independents, um, a lot of them really resonate with what we're saying. Now, granted, many of them have thrown me out of their office because they say, well, it's well, this is not a direct democracy. This is this is people sent me here because they trust in me. And that is, and regardless of party, that is a point of view. But there are those, again, regardless of party, who believe that they were sent there to be good public servants and just want a better way to know what their constituents want with without all the bias of the media, without all the chaos on social media, without the the party whip like coming down on top of them or some lobbyist coming into their office. It's the gap here is they don't feel like they have a good system of voter input that they can trust where they know that these are real people, that they actually live in their district, and they have an educated themselves on the policies and have a say in the process. Other than somebody turning up at a town hall and screaming and throwing things at them, there's not a great way for a lot of them to get input. And I think they they they are inundated with emails that they know are basically fake a lot of times, or they are um form letters, or now increasingly AI generated emails that they don't know if that person actually lived in their lives in their district at all. People call the switchboard, uh, but again, they can't verify that those people actually live in their districts. Um increasingly, and that can be deep faked. So what what you know those those legislators who truly still see themselves as servant leaders, they have engaged with our project. Many of them have um endorsed our project. You can go on our website and look at our the list of the ones who've endorsed the project, and they're up on our website. Um, some of them are even running for office on a direct democracy platform. If you look at a guy named Dan Williams, who's running for Congress down in the Florida 11th district in Central Florida, he's gone a step further. He's saying, I'm gonna be a pure avatar of the people. I'm gonna go to Congress. If you elect me, I will just vote the way the district tells me to vote using this technology. As long as I think he said, like, you know, what whatever the number is, 100 people, a thousand people, whatever, from the district engaged. So he's got uh at least a critical mass. He's gonna, he's, he's like, look, I'm he's a college professor, and he says, My job is to educate the voters on the policies. It's their job to tell me what they want for our community, and I will vote the way they tell me to vote. And I what I think we need is we need, you know, there's half a million elected officials in the United States, we need half a million Dan Williams to run on a direct democracy platform to say we now have the tools to do what was never achievable before and truly reform or reimagine a 21st century vision for democracy.

SPEAKER_01 39:28

Wow, man, I love that though. Like just the thought of that, like you you can just like you can just visualize the change, um, like a you know, picking up momentum like a snowball over time, man. Um so DDP is operational right now in seven states, I think.

SPEAKER_00 39:48

That's right. Well, we actually all American citizens can vote on federal bills right now, regardless of what state you're in. We can verify people against their um, we can verify people against the voter file down to the U.S. House district that they are in. Um the seven states where we're doing state level legislation is where we have the state voter files where we can verify people down to the state house or state senate precinct that they are assigned to because we have the voter files from the states. So that's Florida, where we originally started, Virginia, Washington, Utah, Arizona, Massachusetts, Michigan. And we're our ambition is to do all 50 states so anybody in all any of the 50 states can vote on state level legislation as well as federal level level legislation where they already already can participate.

SPEAKER_01 40:43

Going back real quick, can you just uh help me with what is the cryptographic tokens you talked about? I know it's I know it's a smaller detail, but I'm just it's good.

SPEAKER_00 40:55

It's important, it's important. In fact, the reason we partnered with votes um is because their technology, I believe, is well, for one, they have a track record. They've operated in several states in Canada and Mexico now, running real elections, so that's a key part of it. But also because they are using blockchain, it means that no single developer can access a database with high-level security credentials and manipulate votes. Um, it they have independent auditors. In fact, some in several of the states where they operate, the political parties themselves audit the blockchain so that that way neither party could gain an advantage. So they kind of do it for that reason. So they have independent auditors as well. We've talked to them about coming on as an independent auditor of the blockchain ourselves, um, just because we're a nonprofit that's nonpartisan, so it kind of makes sense. Um, but that's that what that does is it means that you have it's a zero trust network. If you're familiar with how blockchain works, it's really just a ledger, uh, like an accounting ledger where you count, you know, a vote was added, a vote, you know, here a vote for a yes, a vote for a no on any given item in any given election. And then it uses a system called homomorphic encryption, which is a mechanism where you can encrypt some data, but you can still add, subtract, multiply, you can perform mathematical operations against encrypted data. That's a key development in the last few years that allows you to do something like this where you encrypt a vote. So you're protecting the secret ballot, but you can still add up um the vote tallies without having to decrypt that vote in order to see the in order to see that this there's a yes, there's a no, and add them all up. So homomorphic encryption is key, blockchain is key, and then the fact that they inside the mobile app them itself, they're using device level encryption. So you your individual phone gets a cryptographic token, it's like a vote token that allows you to place that token onto the blockchain when it's time for you to vote securely. Um, so it's that device level authenticity is important too, so that somebody couldn't try to steal Jordan's identity or Ramon's identity. You'd have to physically have your phone and and with touch ID or or face ID turned on on your phone or uh or the pattern or pin code, you would have to be the owner of the phone in order to cast the ballot on the on the voting app. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 43:34

Perfect, thank you. Um before we start wrapping up, I wanted to ask you. I know that uh the 4th of July recently passed. Um what are your thoughts on um you know where America stands uh at 250? Um you know, be as honest as as you're comfortable being. Um, yeah, you know, what are your what are your thoughts? Thoughts? Um, where is your where is your pride level? How do you kind of gauge that? Um, yeah, what are your thoughts and feelings?

SPEAKER_00 44:07

Yeah, I mean, this is this is tough and it's very nuanced for me because I mean I've worn the uniform of my country. I had a classmate of mine, you know, who was who was killed by a sniper in Armadi in 2004. And I think about Tyler a lot. So I appreciate that. But I I think about him a lot when I do this work because look, I I believe in this country and in the vision of what it can be, but I am at least more willing now to acknowledge all the times where we've fallen short of that vision. And I do think that it's a responsibility for every generation of Americans to carry the baton on this 250-year experiment in democracy, because we either are going to prove to people that this is worth saving, or we're going to watch it fall apart in front of our eyes because people have just become convinced that it's so corrupt and it's this the rot is so systematic that it simply cannot be saved and it's not worth saving. And that's the fear that I have. That motivates me every single day. That I it's sometimes very hard to feel proud to be an American like I used to, you know, 20 years ago when I was first putting on the uniform. But I still feel proud of the moral purpose that was originally defined for us, that we still can achieve. And I think that that that drives my motivation all the time. And honestly, um, watching the World Cup and seeing people from all over the world come to the to this country, it made me feel incredibly proud, actually. Um, so I'm I'm excited that America still can be a great accepting center uh of the world community, and really it's just a matter of can we effectuate that the founder's vision? And my hope is that we now have the technology to really do that.

SPEAKER_01 46:18

Cool, man. Well, it's been it's been a pleasure meeting you. Uh and I mean let's let's uh shout out our love to Tyler and you know dedicate this episode to him, man. Um thank you. Thank you, thank you greatly for your service. Um before before you get going, though, can you please let everyone know where they can find you, uh, where they can go to check out DDP, uh anything that you'd like to talk about or promote before you go, um the stage is yours, my friend.

SPEAKER_00 46:51

Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, digital democracyproject.org. We're a nonprofit, we're all volunteers. So if you've got listeners who are coders, you know, great with uh JavaScript or Python, please, we'd love to have your help. Um, if you've got listeners who are legislative analysts, public policy nerds, we would love to have your help. Um, organizers, people who are connected to nonprofit organizations who can help spread the word, people like you and independent media, actually. I think that you you play an important role because we're gonna have this. We now have corporate media consolidation, we're gonna have like three billionaires running the whole media system. So I do think independent media is kind of how we're gonna spread new ideas. And so um, yeah, we we need all the help because this is a community effort. It's not gonna be down to any one person to lead this, it's gonna be to all of us to decide uh that this democracy is worth investing in and that we want to build a vision for what our children and grandchildren are going to inherit. So please come join us. Donations are always appreciated. We got to pay for all this the servers and the software licenses. Um, but check us out, digitaldemocracyproject.org.

SPEAKER_01 48:04

Right on, man. Well, uh Ramon, it's been a pleasure to meet you. Um, I would definitely like to uh reach out again and have you back for for more discussions. Uh, but yeah, if there's anything I can do to help, uh, yeah, make sure to reach out. But um, yeah, I've got your contact info and uh we would love to have you back.

SPEAKER_00 48:23

All right, I appreciate the time. That means a lot. So thank you, Jordan.

SPEAKER_01 48:26

Thank you, and we appreciate your time. So uh yeah, all the best, and uh you'll be hearing from me uh eventually.

SPEAKER_00 48:33

Absolutely. Okay, all right.

SPEAKER_01 48:35

The best to you, and you take care. All right, bye then. All right, take care. All right, guys. Uh, there we go. Um uh Ramon Perez, he's with the Digital Democracy Pog Project. I believe that's digitaldemocracy.org. Uh, you can check him out. Also, make sure to check out the Scott Horton Academy, which uh I've been checking out uh doing doing one course lately. And yeah, it's really good stuff, man. Uh go to Scott Horton Academy.com slash divulgence and you will get a discount. You can get a yearly membership, I believe, or a lifetime membership, uh, which I recommend. That's what I went with. Uh, it just makes more sense to me. Um, and yeah, make sure to please subscribe to Divulgence on YouTube, uh, Rumble, Dive Um Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts. Um, help us with the algorithm. We would really like to be able to bring you better guests, uh, better content, more content. And uh, by doing that, we got to grow a bit more. Um, yeah, so leave us a five-star review, a heart, a thumbs up, uh, a positive comment. Um thank you to everyone who who does do that. Um, always know my email and our messages. Uh you can and our social media is always open for people to contact us. If you guys have any suggestions, comments, concerns, anything like that, people you want to uh us to connect with. If you if you feel like you'd want to come on the show, feel free to uh reach out. Uh, I think that's about it, other than we still have a few spots left. We're trying to close uh the gap and get us to a thousand subscribers on YouTube, and we are giving away an iPad to those who subscribe um until we get to the thousand. So we still have a few spots left. Uh, we did get a nice boost uh last week of subscribers, and then as usual, we got a bunch taken away. So uh I'm hoping that once we get to to the 1000 point, things will kind of calm down for us and uh we can we can focus properly on growth. So make sure to please subscribe to Divulgence Podcast on YouTube. Take a screenshot, send it to divulgence mail at gmail.com. You will be entered in to win a brand new iPad and a case. We also have some runner-up prizes. Um, we're gonna let you choose between um if you want some books um or some Kubrick movies, um, a lot of cool stuff. So make sure to please do that. Also, if you are subscribed, go check and make sure you still are subscribed. And if you want to um solidify your chance of winning that iPad, you can get five bonus entries for every uh referral subscription that you get. Um, just send the screenshot, and that that person can also get their initial entry, of course. Um, but yeah, thank you to everyone for their support. We are gonna have a show. We're hoping to have a show Friday and Sunday. And uh yeah, stay tuned. This was a great one, and I hope you guys enjoyed it and wishing everyone the very best. Take care.