I was struck with the ‘numbers’ from our Mobile Voting Global Innovation Challenge which we successfully closed out recently.

We launched our Mobile Voting Global Innovation Challenge with our partners at InnoCentive last June. We offered $230,000 to the winning team(s) that could solve the 3 toughest technical challenges of building the world’s most secure, transparent, scalable and verifiable voting system in the world – accessed through your favorite mobile device of course!

For the first part of the Challenge, we asked some of the smartest minds around the world to propose a solution to what seemed like a an impossible task – create a voting system that was ‘mass hack-proof’!  (Without this as our number 1 priority, we knew nothing else really mattered.)

We also asked “Solvers” to propose solutions for ensuring that we could accurately authenticate voters on a mobile device as good as or better than the in-person processes we have today.

And lastly, we asked for solutions that could be used by both 3rd-parties and voters alike to validate and verify that the vote they cast was indeed accurately counted; all of which could be proven without losing the anonymity that is so important in governmental elections.

So what were the ‘numbers’ from the Challenge?

• 3,116 people investigated our Challenge over a 3 month period.
• 237 people registered as “Solvers”.
• 110 people submitted solutions to 1 or all 3 of the categories we defined.
• The 110 Solvers came from 32 countries which gave us a wonderful global perspective for our platform.

So where does our new math come in (3,116 + 237 + 110 + 32 = 1 Billion)?

The math is simple because we are very pleased to announce that we have selected solutions from the Challenge that we are confident gives us the fundamental technical framework to create the world’s most secure, scalable, transparent and verifiable voting system to enable us to drive 1 billion votes through our platform by 2025!

Our Technical Advisory Board (https://www.votem.com/about-us/) did a fantastic job of wading through the submissions over several voting rounds to select the winners.

We’re not ready to let you in on precisely what we are building (that’s coming later) but stay tuned and you’ll hear more from us soon.

If you’re ready to help us build the next generation voting system, send an email to MostVotesEver@votem.com with your resume and a few sentences about why you want to be a part of our team.