New Podcast: Pete Martin Wants to Restore Faith in Elections with New Voting Technologies | Online Voting with Votem®

Pete Martin, the CEO and founder of Votem, was interviewed on Mission Matters Business Podcast by Adam Torres. Pete Martin has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise technology and software. In addition to launching and running Votem, he is the author of Sparking a Mobile Revolution: How Mobile Voting Will Change the World as We Know It.

Hey, Id like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. You can follow me on Instagram @AskAdamTorres. And if youd like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to MissionMatters.com and click on be our guest to apply. Okay. So today I have Pete Martin on the line and he is founder and CEO of Votem. Pete, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Adam. I really appreciate it. Im super honored to be on the show. Weve got a pretty big mission to talk about. So Im super excited to have a little bit of fun today.

Yeah, this is going to be fun. Excited is an understatement on my end. I mean, its not often I get to talk to an entrepreneur or a business owner that has a big, big mission of upgrading democracy. When we were preparing for this, I was trying to wrap my around it and Im like, Wow, this is big. Youre really looking at making a difference and doing some big things. So, Ill start. Were going to get into Votem. Well talk about specifically what youre doing, how youre doing it, how youre solving a lot of big, critical challenges out there. Just to get us started, Ill start this show, like we start them all. So Pete, we at Mission Matters, we end amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. So thats our mission here. Pete, what mission matters to you?

The biggest mission that matters to Votem, when we talk about upgrading democracy is we want to try to restore trust in elections globally. So if we talk about what happened in the U.S. last year and is still perpetuating right now between misinformation, disinformation, the fact of the matter is that trust in the outcome in election is at an all-time low. there is a group called the Edelman Trust. They have the Edelman Trust Barometer. What they found is that the trust in elections and trust in government and trust in election outcomes globally is at an all-time low over the last, I think, 60 or 80 years that theyve been studying this. So thats our mission is to restore trust. We think the most important factor in restoring trust is to give the individual voter or the citizen the verifiable proof that their vote was counted exactly as they cast their ballot. Thats this really difficult mission that were trying to chase after.

Yeah, thats a big one, Pete. This is one thats going to change the fates of many. I love it and its one of the reasons that I was excited to have you on the show today. So well go further down that path, but Id like to know a little bit more about just Pete. How did you get started on this mission as a business owner and on the journey to tackle this type of problem?

So, Im a serial entrepreneur. I was genetically encoded an entrepreneur. My grandfather was. My father was. I dont think I had a choice. Votem is actually my fifth company. I sold my last business about a little over five years ago. Ive always been interested in politics. I ran for president of my student government in high school and just have always watched from the sidelines with a fascinating curiosity. So when I sold my business, I very seriously thought about going into politics at the state level in Ohio, which is where were headquartered. A lot of my friends and family who know me just said, Pete, youre the classic type A entrepreneur. Politics is a completely different animal. Youre not a very patient man. Just make sure that thats what you really want to do because we think youre going to go crazy. Right?

So, I talked to a lot of advisors on the political front and had that rattling around in the back of my head. I ended up going to a CEO conference put on by a gentleman by the name of Peter Diamandis. Peter Diamandis has run whats called the XPRIZE and Singularity University, and very good friends with Elon Musk and folks like that. And so, hes got a very different perspective on the world and perspective on business. So at this conference called Abundance 360, he had everybody in the audience go through this exercise, this little workshop. The workshop was basically to take out a blank piece of paper and write down what youre going to do before you die that will positively impact a billion people in the world.

And so, his point was youre all business people, you know how to make money, create wealth, whatever, but dont focus on the money, focus on impact, right? And so, this is a way to kind of reframe that thinking of what could be your life legacy, right? What is your impact? I didnt know this question was coming, so I sat there for five minutes just going, Oh my God, to impact a billion people, what would I do? I literally wrote down mobile voting on this piece of paper and Im like, Wow, where did that come from? Right? The more I looked at these two words, I thought for me personally, this is the perfect intersection for me. Ive been in technology my entire career. This is a way to get into politics without being square in the center of politics, right? Most importantly, it was a big impact.

Since it was my fifth company, my four companies prior to that, were great. We had a mission, but it was a small mission in whatever market we were playing in, but nobody missed us if we went away. From that perspective, it wasnt really this global big impact thing. So I thought about that and I spent a lot of money for this conference and I literally spent the rest of the conference writing down the hundred questions about voting. At the time, Im like, Who buys election systems? How does this happen? Right? I didnt know any of this stuff. So I spent the next six months talking to a lot of people about, is there a market opportunity here? Is this really an impact that we could make or its just a pipe dream? Why are we not doing it right now? All that kind of stuff. So, thats how I got started in this next venture of mine.

Wow. What a story. Its like sometimes when those moments of inspiration hit, I mean, many years in the making to get to that point, to be at that conference, to be at that place. So just for context, for everybody watching this, were recording this in 2021, because people will be watching this for years and years and years, so 2021. And so, I want you to maybe start out with painting the picture of the current voting landscape. Lets just say we could say whats wrong. We could say the opportunities, whats broken. I mean, lots of different ways to word it, but its definitely not perfect. So give us your views on some of the opportunity areas for the current voting landscape.

Yeah. So well focus a little bit on the U.S. first and then Ill pull out a little bit and well talk about whats going on around the world at a macro level. So in the U.S., for those of you that are listening now, if its 10 years from now, youll look back at the 2020 elections and say, Oh my God, what just happened in the U.S.? Right? Effectively, so we had the highest turnout that weve had in a long, long time, 40-some years, right? But at the end of the day, the loser, President Trump and a lot of folks in the political environment have sown a lot of mistrust in the outcome. Okay. This has been adjudicated in 60 courts. There were claims of fraud. Claims that the election was stolen from him.

Im not going to get political at all. I want to talk about the fabric of the voting process and the election systems, right? Whats really happened now is there was a growing mistrust in moving towards electronic voting, on electronic voting machines, perhaps online voting, which is the stuff that were doing, everything but paper ballots. And so, whats happening now is theres a movement back towards moving to paper, which is how we did it basically a hundred and some years ago. A lot of that is because of this trust in something called software that we cant see it, we cant feel it, we cant touch it. We dont trust it as much. And then, obviously, the legitimate fear of hacking, right?

We know that nation-states were trying to interfere with the elections and well talk about that a little bit, but between all of that and then all of the stuff thats happening in social media, its just created this environment, where were supposed to be this beacon of democracy and were supposed to think that we have a great process to elect our leader, and its at an all time low, right? Theres this conflict between how elections are run and the verifiability of them and our trust in that process and accessibility.

So lets just say, we agree, even though I dont agree, that paper is the best method, right? Theres a whole demographic of people in the U.S. and globally that cant maybe get to the poll for lots of reasons. Ill give you a personal story around that. Or they physically cant handle a paper ballot because of a physical ability that they dont have.

And so, theres always this tension between making voting accessible and making it secure and verifiable and transparent, right? So in the U.S., were going through this giant demographic experiment right now, which is why we call it upgrading democracy of were actually going back into the past and in ways that we did it a long time ago, even though the rest of the world and everything else we do in our lives is moving to electronic, from hailing a cab on Uber to paying our taxes, to banking, you name it, medical records. Everything is moving in an electronic direction. In the election space, were moving in the other way. This is crazy.

There are countries around the world that have moved in this direction a little bit more than we have. Theres a little country called Estonia thats been doing this for about 12 years. Theres a very interesting story going on in Brazil right now. Brazil has been doing electronic voting for 12 or 14 years now. Its not online voting, but its electronic voting, where you literally vote on an electronic machine and cast your ballot. The current President now is sowing some distrust, saying that he doesnt trust the machines that theyve been using for 14 years and he wants to go back to paper ballots, right? His reason for that is its less secure, right? Its much more easy to manipulate. But Adam, theres lots of stories about ballot boxes full of paper ballots not showing up at the precinct or showing up at a dump store, sitting at some trunk somewhere.

And so, the global landscape and the U.S. landscape of voting is just in this disarray of A lot of people, if you talk to the normal citizen and weve talked, weve done tons of surveys on this with 10,000 of people and they will say, I support online voting if you can convince me, Pete, that its safe and secure. Right? We know its a better way to vote, and Ill share some stories in the show about that. We just want to know that we can trust it. One of the things that were working on actively and its a big part of our mission is if you can give people that confidence that their vote was actually counted, then we can help start to begin to restore that trust. So the story that I always ask people, the question I always ask people, lets just say, you believe going to a polling place and filling out a paper ballot feels more secure. The minute you leave that polling place, how do you know that vote was counted?

Weve seen enough stuff on social media that were legit videos, whatever. Were not getting political, but just in general, whatever, we know that paper allows for other things to happen, for sure.

Thats exactly right. And so, people forget that when you think about it. So, its this very interesting dilemma of that the normal citizen says, I think its a better method. Just convince us its secured and it cant be hacked. Right? Then youve got elections officials, the ones who actually run elections will say, We kind of support it too. We dont necessarily understand the tech, but as long as the experts say this is okay, were good with it. And then you get the elected officials, and thats where the problem comes in because we say in the voting space that our job is to convince the losers that they lost fair and square, right? Thats the name of the game. And so, we have some technology that finally, you can have all kinds of stakeholders in election. You can have candidates, parties, media, election observers can all validate every single vote in real time with some technology. Thats never been done before.

Right? So if we can move to that direction, where everybody gets the chance to audit mathematically every single vote that comes in, you may not like the outcome of the election, but you cant dispute it, right? You cant contest it. Thats the big mission. Its a really big one. Its a really hard one, but its a worthwhile pursuit,

As you say this, its like one of those things that it seems as soon as you say it, its common sense. Who wouldnt want it, number one? If you failed to had that confidence that your vote was counted and just thinking about just the potential for what could happen with that, how much more of a turnout wed have? Because I feel like many people dont show up just because they feel their votes are not going to be counted. I dont mean literally by any type of fraud. I just mean in general they think that their voice doesnt matter as a participant in democracy. So they feel isolated from it. Now, whether thats right or wrong, doesnt matter, but thats the feeling for a lot of people.

And so, now, if you had that, even if it wasnt real time, which the amazing thing is that youre working on real time, even if it wasnt, even if you got This is the way Ive always seen it. You get a confirmation email for everything. You get a confirmation for everything, when you go to the bank. If I go buy a stick of gum from 7-Eleven right now, Im going to get a confirmation in the form of a receipt. So when you think about something as huge as who are our elected leaders and officials, it sounds obvious. I dont get how maybe people dont get that.

Heres a crazy concept too. So there is a law, and I cant remember the exact statute in federal banking, right? So if you think about electronic banking versus going to a branch or whatever? So lets say you go to an ATM. You withdraw some money, you deposit some money, you get an ATM receipt, right? So under federal law, the electronic transaction record actually trumps anything that is on that paper receipt. So theres this movement towards paper ballots and a paper receipt, but the fact of the matter is under normal statutes in the U.S., that electronic transaction is way more verifiable. Its indisputable versus that little piece of paper that I just made up anywhere, right? Its crazy. And so, again, its common sense stuff that when it comes to elections, all common sense seems to have flown out the window. Its crazy.

Lets go further. I mean, we talked about it a little bit, but I want to get into the heart of it. So lets go further into Votem and exactly how this works. So first off, maybe just tell us a little bit more about the company.

Yeah. So, the company is about five years old and we use this technology called blockchain. But were not going to go into the technology at all. Well talk about what it enables, I think, which is most important. To date, we have tallied over 13 million votes on our platform. Now, the majority of that has been in private elections. But in the 2020 elections, we did support at a couple states for whats called UOCAVA voters, so basically the military and overseas voters. The way that it works and if youre not in the industry, some of this terminology is a little bit confusing, but they dont actually vote. They submit their ballot electronically through us. We encrypt that ballot. And then the elections officials decrypt the ballot. They turn it into plain text, whatever. And then they process it as they normally would.

But to the voter themselves, they voted online. They dont know any different, right? They marked their ballot online. They got a submission. They got a receipt. They got a confirmation. They fill out an affirmation that they are who they are. They went through the whole process of authenticating that they were a registered voter. So that whole thing, to them, they voted online. The beautiful thing about this constituency, the military and overseas voters And we support disabled voters in the state of Montana as well.

Ill talk about that in a second. When youre serving military personnel and their families, these are the men and women who are supporting our right to vote. Thats what they put their lives on the line to do this. And so, this came about many, many years ago, where the Department of Defense basically said, You guys are making it really hard for our military people to go vote. The average turnout in that constituency has been about seven or 8% historically. Okay. Its horrible because the process was so difficult. And so, weve been able to really make this process a lot easier, both in terms of an elapsed time and just the ease of it.

We had an email from a woman, well, actually a guy on a ship in the Mediterranean for one of our states who said, Im from this state. I just voted online. This was so easy. This is phenomenal. Im sitting next to a guy from, and I wont name the other state, But from another state who they wont allow him to do this and hes got to wait three weeks for his ballot and then fill it out and hope to God, it makes it back in time, right? And I just did this. Please, do this in other states. Its phenomenal. And so, again, its crazy that should be the standard, right?

So, tell me a little bit more about the user experience. So for that, it could be for that gentleman in the military or just in general. So, Im in California. So if California starts using it, what would it look like for me? How would that work?

Theres really three steps, really four steps in the process, where we want to give you the evidence that your vote was counted. So the first one is we want to actually prove that Adam Torres is actually Adam Torres. Each state varies on how they do that. Typically, we want a combination of your full name, your address, and the last four of your social and your birthdate, right? So every state has different ways they authenticate you, but thats the first step. We do that against the voter registration database. Or in some states, we actually do the registration in process. So you authenticate yourself. Thats the first proof point, if you will.

Which is pretty obvious. Of course, they want to know you are you. Okay, go ahead.

Thats right, right? In some cases, we can do thumbprint. We can identify your face, scan face against a drivers license. So it just literally depends not only technology, but on the statute and the state that were working with.

So we proved that you are you, that youre actually Adam and that youre voting. And then based on that, we know what precinct youre in, so we know exactly what type of ballot to give you. Okay. So then we give you ballot. Where the complexity of elections comes in is you could have somebody on the other side of town, whos going to get a different ballot because you might have mill levies or bond issues or school district stuff thats relevant for you, but not the guy or the lady thats on the side.

So its highly customized is what it turns out.

Very customized, right? There are thousands and thousands of styles for any particular state or even county. So, we give you the proper ballot. You mark your ballot. You say, All right, thats exactly how I wanted my vote to be cast. You hit submit. Thats your next evidence point. Okay. Were tracking all this stuff, not the markings, but the fact that you submitted a ballot. At that point, we actually essentially remove your identity from the ballot. Okay. So we know that step one, you are authenticated, then we forget that youre Adam after we serve you up the proper ballot. And then when you submit and confirm, then we basically separate that ballot from your identity. Okay. Then, you get another confirmation that basically the servers received it. Okay. So, you marked it exactly as you intended. Thats the second proof point.

Third proof point basically is we received your ballot, right? Then the final one, which is this is the only technology where we can do this, you cant do with paper, you cant do with electronic voting is we give you basically this code. And then once we do the counting, we shuffle all the ballots, so if you imagine, theres a ballot box, physical ballot box, and somebody is shaking it and they dump it out on a table and start to read them, tally them, we do that electronically and we do that in a very secure encrypted environment. Then we decrypt the ballots, and then we count them. We do a check on that to make sure that whatever, if a hundred ballots came in, a hundred ballots got counted.

And then we create to a bulletin board basically a log of all the ballots that we tallied. And then you can compare your number to that bulletin board. If they match, you know that nothing changed, not a bit, not a mark, nothing changed between the time you marked your ballot and the time we counted it, right? It is the only technology of the entire voting system where we can do that. So you now know factually irrefutably that your ballot was counted exactly as you cast it, right? Thats the power of what we do.

Its so logical. You walk me through that user journey. It seems like youve taken, I mean, all this complication, everything else. I mean, the main thing with voting too, in my opinion, is that it has to be simple to where anybody can understand.

Whether youre high and really advance in tech or other things like For whatever its worth, you have to be able to understand it. You have to be able to understand the process and get that thing within a minute, right? So, your user journey sign up, you have to say who you are, going to vary depending on what state youre in-

whether its facial recognition, whether its thumbprint, whether its type in your name or last four of your social, whatever. So now we know who you are. After you verified who you are, youre able to do the voting. The voting is highly customized towards you, towards your county. So that things as small as or as important, not just small, but details as small a local school bond that yous thinking about your voting dollars, do I want to spend money to support that or not, something that granular is not going to be missed. You cast your vote.

Thats right. Lets compare it to paper-based voting. Okay. So theres a couple concepts here that we basically saw for this. So the first is as many times as you ask somebody to fill in the little bubble with the black pen, inevitably people will put an X or a check.

or the hanging chad back from 2000, right? By law, those have to be rejected. Okay.

So no matter how many times you tell somebody to do that, they just dont read the People dont read instructions, right? So A, we solve for that. The second thing is lets just say you have a contest, where it says you can only vote for one person. You can only mark one candidate for president. Inevitably, people will vote for two or something. We can keep you from doing that electronically. We wont literally wont let you mark two. We can only let you mark one, right? Same thing, thats called overvoting. Then theres a concept called undervoting, which says by law, for this statute, you have to pick one choice, right? Some people be on paper ballots might say, Well, I didnt read up on it. I dont study them. Im not going to mark it. Ballot gets rejected. Okay.

We control it. We literally wont let you go to the next contest until you mark that. So these very simple human errors we saw for all of that stuff before you ever submit your ballot.

Wow. Also, just the [crosstalk 00:24:41] errors.

Yeah. So we know by the time you get to the point of submitting your ballot, all those common typical errors that happen and all these ballots that get rejected, we dont get them rejected. So you cant move until you complete the ballot.

Oh man, which is terrible because somebodys thinking that they voted or that they did this and they did that and theyre like, oh, they didnt mark the ballot right or they just missed something. Because of that, they went. They took their time. They thought they were participating and then it wasnt counted, which brings me to the next part of your process, which was essentially, they voted, theyve submitted. Now, Adam, on that electronic vote is no longer Adam. Now, Im just a number. I have that number. The number is also associated with the ballot that I submitted, the electronic, I should say, ballot that I submitted. Now, everything is mixed up. Not my answers, but the tallies mixed up, so the count will be shuffled.

Its anonymous. Its anonymous at that point, right?

So youre basically like if you were a dealer, youre shuffling the cards or youre washing the cards there. Again, so when it comes back to you and youre looking at was your vote counted or not? Well, number one, when you did the submission, you received your confirmation there. The next point of confirmation, correct me if Im wrong, is now when the tally comes out, so to speak, and all the votes are listed, you can match your number, the number on your system, so that now you can say, Okay. That was my vote. I know because I have the number. I have the confirmation. That was mine. My answers were counted. They were not changed.

Thats exactly right. The way that our technology works in this thing called blockchain is theres this concept called validators. So you can think of them as auditors, right? And so, theres essentially a mathematical formula to say, does all the math, does all the software code add up by the time I get to the each step of the process? Of all the auditors, if you will, two-thirds of those auditors have to agree mathematically that things are adding up. The reason its not 100% is lets just say somebody attacks one of the servers and the server goes down, right? So you dont ever want to be a place where you got 100%. So its called this consensus protocol. As long as two-thirds always agree each step of the way, you know factually that everything is copacetic.

Ill give you a real story. For the fourth or fifth year, weve just run the vote for the Radio Hall of Fame. We just finished out. Theres, I think, a hundred-some thousand votes. The first year that we did this, they moved from paper ballots to online ballots. Their auditor, so they actually hire an audit firm that actually audit the results. So we set up the separate server for the auditing firm and said Once we did that, we literally cut off all access. So if something happened to it, were like, Youre on your own. We cant do anything. We literally cut off our own access. And then we had a server and we were validating every vote that came in in real time. It used to be, they would take a couple days after the election to actually certify the results, right? Because they wanted to do the audit and theyre looking at ballots, whatever. Theyve now moved to within 10 to 20 minutes after the elections over, they certify the results.

Thats amazing. What kind of response did you get from that? Im just curious.

As you might imagine. So the board for the Radio Hall is very happy. The chairman is very happy. You think about it, from a candidate perspective, everybody is waiting, Oh my God. Are these the results and have you certified them? Did I win or did I not win? So everybody is on pins and needles. What weve found is the longer that it takes, the more doubt it sows, right?

Right? And so, just like happened in the U.S. presidential election, as the results kept coming in later and later and later, it sowed more and more doubt. So if you can deliver results like that and you have these external auditors and independent authorities saying, Everything, all the math worked out properly and we gave you the results in 10 minutes, the doubt goes away.

Yeah, thats huge. I mean, thats big time and thats just proof-positive. It seems to me like the more people use this technology state by state, county by county, however this has to go, which brings me to my next question, but that just means the trust will build. Theyll see it. The more people do it. If I was one of those voters voting in that particular election and I feel this real time experience, and then I have to go deal with when its time to do my state or local or federal elections, then Im thinking about, What I have to do? Why cant I just use What was that thing I did for this other vote? That worked. Why cant I do that? Logically, it just makes sense that the adoption rate would over time improve, which brings me to my next question. So, whats next? Whats next for you? Whats next for Votem? Where do we go from here?

Yeah. Ill tell you just to hit off that last point of the We do a little survey of all of our voters afterwards. 99-point, I dont know if its 100%, Im sure some people not fill out the survey, but 99% of the people say this is vastly superior of voting in any other method. We know were in the right direction here. Theres four big challenges we have to attack. One is just the technological challenge in terms of proving to security researchers and academics and public officials, frankly, that the technology is sound, that it works, that its legitimate, and frankly that it cant be hacked. Okay. Then youve got all the political issues, which were not going to deal with. Were going to let someone else would deal with that.

And then youve got social issues of, I cant see the technology. Yes, this is an easier user experience. But again, I want to know that the results are legitimate and they havent been hacked and manipulated. Right? So theres social media communications thing around that that we can influence a little bit. And so, were focusing on those two paths, which ultimately will lead to running a lot more pilots. We know that the more pilots we run successfully without incident and people get used to this method.

I mean, speaking of pilots, so you gave us one. So, is there anything else planned? How do you plan to expand that thought process? Because I feel like pilots is the way. I mean, I would say that, Hey, sign us up over here at Mission Matters. What kind of vote? What can we do at Votem? But all jokes aside, what youre doing is much more serious. This isnt like an online poll. This isnt something like that.

This has the truth and potential to literally upgrade democracy, which again, thats a big statement, bold claim, but its pretty obvious. If people feel empowered to participate more, if they feel that their vote counts, their vote matters, if they get at real time or faster results, all these things add up. So again, so pilots, how do you plan to continue on that part of the mission?

Yeah. What were focused on right now for the next election cycle in 22 and even 24 is winning the trust and the confidence of elected officials and elections officials that actually run. I mean, the way that were doing that, as well as citizens is we actually own the patent for something called express voting. So the concept is on your phone, you authenticate that youre eligible voter. You get your ballot. You mark your ballot. You submit it. And instead of actually casting an actual vote, it creates a QR code. Okay. By law in most states, you still have to go to the polling place. Okay. So think about fast pass or think about you pre-order your Starbucks, or whatever similar analogy. And so, the idea is we can then go to a polling place, wherein we saw in 2020, these massive lines in Georgia and everywhere of people that waited four hours, six hours to go vote.

So we can now deliver a fast pass line, if you will, where youve already marked your ballot. Once you check in, then you literally hold that QR code up against the machine. It prints off your printed ballot thats already marked. You hand it over to the elections official and youre done. And so, we can massively accelerate the time that takes you to actually go into the polling place, cast your vote. All the time it takes to do that, we basically eliminate all of that. And so, the benefit of that is we can operate in all 50 states. We can eliminate majority of the lines at the polling place, and its still a paper ballot and youre not changing any of the process. We can fit into the existing voting infrastructure without changing anything.

Its really indisputable because youre not actually voting online. We think the benefit of that is its this perfect ramp to the citizens getting super comfortable with. I voted online and that was a vastly easier process. We already had the technology to not create a QR code to basically hit submit, right? And then your vote is cast. And so, we can just literally flick a switch to get to that point. So thats what were focused on for 2020. We call it vote and go. We think that if we can build a groundswell of people who just say, My gosh, I want to do that because thats way easier. I trust it because Im printing off a printed ballot, well be in a much better position in 2024 and beyond to really make a huge impact in the U.S.

Its almost like a concert ticket, right? Once upon a time, at Ticketmaster, you used to have to wait in line at your stadium and then you got to pay. Then you got to bring out your credit card. And then at another point in time, youre like, Oh wait, I can just pay online? Okay. Great. I pay online. Then I print out my little sheet. Then I go and I get right in. I dont have to wait in that other line.

So it becomes just like a concert going experience, if you will. But the big benefit here, too, is, correct me if Im wrong, you still get all the other benefits and features. So you get the confirmation.

You know what I mean? You scan something. That bucket of scans or however I would say that, you correct my word, my verbiage on that, that cant disappear. Thats a record. Am I off on that or is that Am I understanding-

Nope. Nope, youre exactly right. The other analogy you can think about is probably from a citizen perspective, the most secure environment right now is an airport, right? So its like a boarding pass now thats on your phone. I dont see too many paper boarding passes anymore. I mean, theres some, but not a lot, right? They let you through whats supposed to be the tightest security in the world with electronic QR code on your phone, right? Whats more important, voting or getting on an airline? Im not sure.

I love it. No, thats great. It makes a lot of sense. For the record, I like my analogy better. Its fun. I want people to think of voting as fun. Youre going to a concert, like vote, get out and vote. Thats the other underlying thing with [crosstalk 00:35:55].

Good for you. I do like it too. Im a big music guy. So yeah, I like your analogy too, Adam.

If everybody hasnt caught that, get out and vote.

Oh, man. Well, Pete, I have to tell you, Im a big fan of what youre doing and whats going on over at Votem. I look forward to the day when I can use your technology, and doing that, Im going to remember this interview for sure and-

this start. Really, its a big shift that youre looking to make worldwide with this technology.

That being said, great having you on the show. If somebody is listening to this or watching this and they want to learn more about Votem or to connect with you and your team, I mean, whats the best way for them to get involved?

They can just go to our website, which is Votem.com, V-O-T-E-M.com. And theres a couple places where they can subscribe. We need help, frankly, whether its writing letters to politicians, participating in pilots, contributing to what we call our voting protocol. We need a community to Any mission you need a community, right? And so, this is one that we need to really be a community if were going to make this a big impact in the U.S. and around the world in anytime in the near future. So, Votem.com is the place to go to sign up to get involved.

Amazing. Well, Pete, again, thank you for coming on the show today. To the audience, as always, thank you for tuning in. Hope you got a lot of value out of this. Hope you learned a lot. If you did, dont forget, hit that subscribe button. We definitely want you to be a return listener, return visitor. We have many more mission-based entrepreneurs and business owners and executives coming on the line and we dont want you to miss anything. Pete, it really has been a pleasure. Big fan of Votem. Happy to have you on the show today.

Thanks, Adam. It was a really fun time and super informational. I appreciate the dialogue and the back and forth. Thanks for having me on the show.

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