Democracy In Your Pocket

In this episode…

Ramon Perez, Founder - Digital Democracy Project joins me for Ripple & Root, Season 1, Episode 1!

You can learn more about the conversation and the guest below..

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VIDEO: Ripple & Root S1 Ep01

Democracy In Your Pocket with Ramon Perez, Founder — Digital Democracy Project

About the Guest

An AI technology executive and military veteran, Ramon Perez founded the Digital Democracy Project to address systemic problems in our electoral system, which result in hyperpartisanship and widespread voter alienation. He believes that, to achieve better outcomes, we must use technology to give greater control directly to voters.

Full Episode Transcript

Jess Vachon  00:31

Hello everyone. Welcome to Ripple and Root. I'm glad to have you here for our first episode, and I have a guest who actually inspired us to start this podcast — but we'll get to that in just a minute. There's a question I've been sitting with lately: What do you do when the things that you gave your life to protect start to break? Not in some abstract, far-off way, but right here in your own country, in the institutions you were trained to believe in. Do you grieve it? Do you rage? Do you look away? Or do you pick up your tools and build something new and unique? Today's guest chose to build. Ramon Perez is a U.S. military veteran who served 13 years on active duty with deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He came home in 2017 as a technology consultant, specializing in AI and machine learning for governments and large companies. And then January 6th happened. In his own words, he found himself asking how he could have spent so many years fighting for democracy in other countries, only to watch it start to crumble here in the U.S. The question didn't paralyze him. It produced the Digital Democracy Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit initiative that uses secure blockchain mobile technology to give everyday voters a direct line to their legislators. And don't worry — we're going to explain all that. Not every four years. Right now, it's available. It will allow you to view the bills being debated today and see the outcomes. What began in Florida in 2023 now operates across seven states and covers federal legislation for every registered voter in the United States. And Ramon isn't done. His target: all 50 state legislatures by 2027. I am so grateful he said yes to this conversation. Welcome to Ripple and Root, Ramon.

Ramon Perez  02:21

Well, thank you so much for having me. That was an incredibly kind intro. I hope this conversation lives up to the expectations of your audience. I want to do a good job. I'm excited — excited about our work, excited about what you're doing and the importance of spreading the word through independent media, to highlight the kind of work those of us in democracy reform are up to. So thank you for the time.

Jess Vachon  02:49

Well, thank you again. I want to find out about the person behind the project first. You joined the military after 9/11, which was a defining moment for an entire generation. Those of us who were adults — or becoming adults — at that time will never forget that day, because the world stood still for a period of time. What drew you into the military specifically?

Ramon Perez  03:14

I've had a circuitous journey. I was originally studying engineering at Georgia Tech and was very interested in designing airplane engines. After 9/11, everything changed. I realized I had been met with a call to arms — I wanted to serve as an intelligence officer. I felt that was what the country needed at that moment. Obviously, we think of 9/11 as a major intelligence failure, and I wanted to understand how we could improve that process. So I became an Air Force officer, an Air Force intelligence officer. I was assigned to a variety of special operations units, served at the National Security Agency, and deployed several times with Joint Task Force for Special Operations, using intelligence collection to find and neutralize high-level al-Qaeda targets from the battlefield. After the bin Laden mission, I felt a sense of closure — I had come in after 9/11 with that explicit purpose, and that felt like a meaningful bookend. I left active duty in 2011, became a reservist, and went back to graduate school to study finance and economics. This was post-financial market crash, so I became very interested in emergent market economics. I lived in South America, then in Europe, and was in London working at a company in AI and machine learning, doing financial markets modeling and using modern tools to predict risk. I was in London during the pandemic, and then January 6th happened. I thought of my college friend Tyler Brown, who is now buried at Arlington Cemetery — he was shot by a sniper in Ramadi in 2004. I felt I needed to understand what Tyler's sacrifice was for, if we were watching our democratic process start to crumble because we were no longer able to talk to one another, no longer able to reach consensus. The system felt like it was breaking down. Thinking like an engineer and an intelligence officer, I wanted to dig into why we were finding ourselves in a situation where, during COVID, we had wildly divergent policy goals depending on which party or state you were in. And then January 6th. And I had been in Portland in 2021 and saw the results of the unrest there — it was unsettling to see that level of destruction in an American city so rapidly. I felt that people were losing faith in democracy. If they don't believe democracy can deliver for them anymore, they will turn to either dictatorship or anarchy, because those alternatives are always on the table. When I spent the energy to understand the systemic problems in our election process, I realized we don't have bad outcomes because we're bad people. Americans care deeply and do spend time informing themselves. What they have is a bad set of incentives — our political leaders own the elections in which they run. They gerrymander maps, put up ballot access barriers, and make it nearly impossible for anyone to compete in the marketplace of ideas. They don't listen to voters, and they don't have good tools. My background in AI, machine learning, and technology — combined with my desire to continue serving even out of uniform — led to the genesis of the Digital Democracy Project.

Jess Vachon  08:54

I want to roll back a little bit — there was a lot there. It seems like everywhere you went, there was either a pandemic or social upheaval happening. You got to see many varieties of democracy in different places, and hopefully the birth of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq as you traveled over the years after leaving the military. Looking back, what elements of democracy being built — or democracies failing — influenced how you felt when you saw January 6th?

Ramon Perez  09:39

I was in Iraq in 2007, seeing a lot of the sectarian violence between Shia and Sunnis — which is ultimately an argument not just over religion, but over who has power in a society and who gets to dominate whom. Tribalism — whether along religious, cultural, or ethnic lines — always provides an excuse for human beings to isolate one group from another, define the other side as the enemy, and eventually descend into violence if it's not resolved in a rational, amicable way. That's what it felt like we were beginning to see in the United States: political violence in the form of assassination attempts, the storming of the Capitol — honestly, regardless of political motivation, people returning to violence because they feel there's no longer a system of debate and dialogue that works. Our republic functions almost like a pressure valve. Think of a percolator: at some point the steam builds up enough that if there's no valve to release it, the top blows off. In dictatorships and strongman systems, there's no valve. And in any democratic system where the mechanism for releasing steam is removed, political violence fills that void. It's important to acknowledge the systemic nature of the risk we've developed over decades. This isn't really a Donald Trump phenomenon — this is decades of our political system intentionally carving voters out of the process. Gerrymandering, ballot access laws that prevent independents and third parties from competing — that's why 94% of our House districts are completely uncompetitive. They're designed to be. And 80% of Americans live in a one-party state where one party owns the governor's mansion, the legislature, and the courts. For most Americans, a two-party system would actually be a significant upgrade from what we currently have. So the question became: how do we address that structural deficiency? We now have technology that provides a level of access, security, and accountability that wasn't possible before.

Ramon Perez  13:29

We partnered with a company called Voatz, a blockchain-based mobile voting software based out of Boston that has been used for military voters overseas to vote by phone in places where they're deployed and can't get an absentee ballot through the mail. If you're on a submarine or in a special forces unit in the Horn of Africa, the Postal Service doesn't deliver there. I've personally been in that situation where the person I voted for had already dropped out of a primary by the time my ballot arrived. So I completely understood the problem Voatz was designed to solve — but it required a high level of security. You have to verify people against the voter file, match a photo ID with a selfie scan, and employ significant cryptography to ensure there's no manipulation between the phone and the blockchain, or along the blockchain itself. As I was working with their leadership team, I said: if you can do this for military voters overseas, why do we have to wait every few years to have a say in our government? Why not create something like the Netflix of government — where you can have government in your pocket and interact on demand, whenever you want? That's where the idea for the Digital Democracy Project came from. We built it as a nonprofit, using sophisticated, high-grade software to make it possible.

Jess Vachon  15:15

Okay, so here comes the part where we explain blockchain and how this functions at an easy-to-understand level. That's the challenge I'm throwing over to you right now.

Ramon Perez  15:26

People associate blockchain with crypto, which is unfortunately tied up in scammers and fraud — but that's not what we're doing. We're using the fundamental blockchain concept that makes Bitcoin possible. A blockchain is essentially just an accounting ledger — no different from what your bank uses to track your account balance and transactions. The key difference is that instead of having a bank as the intermediary, blockchain is a zero-trust, decentralized system. Multiple copies of the ledger exist simultaneously and are independently verified by many people using their computers at the same time. So when you make a transaction, there are multiple independent checks to validate it. Think of it as banking without the bank as the middleman. Now, voting has unique requirements. You need to verify that this is a real person, a U.S. citizen, registered in the district their congressman represents. You must verify identity — you can't do this with complete anonymity, or you'd have bots and deepfakes flooding the system. At the same time, you have to protect the secret ballot, so a person's vote can't be influenced or bought. We also cannot see individual ballots — we can't harvest data and sell it to advertisers. So we must protect the secret ballot while still being able to verify the individual against the voter file. That's where the encryption layer comes in: homomorphic encryption. This allows you to perform mathematical operations against encrypted data without decrypting it first — you can add two plus two and get four without ever decrypting the twos. For us, that means we can tally votes without decrypting individual ballots. We report results from the blockchain on an hourly basis, so as people are voting on a bill — say, a major piece of legislation — legislators see in near real-time what their district wants. That's real-time polling of constituents, the kind legislators would normally pay a lot for. The value to voters is that at the end of the session, we grade how legislators voted against what their constituents wanted in the app. Did they vote the way their district asked? That produces a scorecard — like a baseball card showing their full record across the roughly 800 bills we've carried so far — tracking how often a legislator actually votes with their district.

Jess Vachon  20:06

Thank you — that was very thorough. You still have to be a registered voter to use the application, correct? That's what verifies you're a registered voter, based on your name, perhaps your social security number and address?

Ramon Perez  20:32

No social security numbers. It's name, date of birth, and zip code — those are usually the three identifying markers that can help us find someone on the voter file. Then the photo ID needs to match the driver's license or passport.

Jess Vachon  20:45

From what I understand: if there are pending bills — whether in a state legislature, the Senate, or the House of Representatives — you can weigh in early and vote on how you want those bills to come out, and your representative can see, going into the vote, which way their constituents want them to cast their vote. Is that right?

Ramon Perez  21:21

Exactly right. And the point about using it in binding elections is actually up to your state supervisor of elections to decide. Some states do have enabling legislation and have already been using mobile voting in pilots — mainly for military voters overseas, but also expanding to people with disabilities who have trouble getting to the polls, such as those with visual impairments who currently lose their secret ballot when someone has to read the screen aloud for them. With mobile voting, the accessibility features are built right in — your iPhone reads the screen to you. West Virginia was the first to pilot this. Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Michigan, and Massachusetts have also run mobile voting pilots in real elections for those target groups. In Ontario, Canada, they went further and opened it to all municipal elections — anyone can vote by phone. And recently, the Mexican government allowed any Mexican citizen outside of Mexico to vote by phone in their national election. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens used this technology. It's definitely gaining traction. But what we want, beyond binding elections, is to give people a say all the time — to bring government directly into people's homes. When they've got 20 spare minutes, they can weigh in on legislation as much or as little as they want. Some people vote on every single bill we carry. Others jump in on specific issues they care about — guns, taxes, abortion — and that's perfectly fine too.

Jess Vachon  24:11

Talk about the challenges of getting this platform accepted in a particular state. What does it look like from the initial conversation to getting it approved and used in practice?

Ramon Perez  24:25

There are two different things to speak about. For mobile voting in binding elections, Voatz works directly with a supervisor of elections — that's a high hurdle, because it requires enabling legislation. For what we're doing with the Digital Democracy Project, it's an advisory ballot. You're telling your legislator how you want them to vote on bills, and tracking whether they did at the end of the session. It's a scorecard — but weighted against democracy rather than party performance. Crucially, we don't need permission from legislators. We don't need to ask any politicians for the right to do this. We go directly to voters and empower them with data and tools. We're also using AI heavily now. We've introduced a chatbot on our website: if you're looking at a bill, we load all the legislative text into a database where the bot can rapidly summarize the legislation and answer detailed questions — how does this affect Medicaid payments, food stamps, and so on. We want to use cutting-edge tools to help inform people about what legislation does and how it affects them, so they feel confident before they tell their legislator how to proceed.

Jess Vachon  26:45

In the areas where this is in use, are legislators listening to their constituents? And if they're not, what's the outcome of that?

Ramon Perez  26:58

It's definitely a mixed bag — and interestingly, it has nothing to do with party affiliation. I've been thrown out of offices of both Democrats and Republicans alike, and I've been embraced by both as well. We had a bipartisan appropriation sponsored by a senior Republican senator, Keith Perry, out of a rural district in Ocala, co-sponsored with a junior, progressive House member named Rita Harris from Orlando. They pushed it through the budget process and through a Republican-controlled legislature, all the way to the governor's desk — until Ron DeSantis line-item vetoed our funding. My philosophy had been that this shouldn't be a nonprofit doing this — it should be something done by the state for the voters. But because we provide accountability scores, certain politicians complained to the governor and had the funding killed. Still, many legislators see real value in this. Nobody likes taking a tough vote, especially when it splits their party. If you're in a ruby red or very blue district, you're worried about getting primaried. So even self-interested politicians want to know what their voters think. Others simply see themselves as servant leaders and want the feedback. Some embrace it; others are terrified of the spotlight it shines on what they're doing.

Jess Vachon  29:09

I get that outcome — it makes sense. This is really the great equalizer. It takes power that has been sitting with entrenched politicians and moves it back to the people, holding them accountable. If you're a servant leader, you're going to love this, because you're not in office for power — you're there to create change. And then you have the power brokers who've been in these roles for decades, drawing their money and influence from sources that have nothing to do with their constituents, and who don't want anything disrupting that flow.

Ramon Perez  30:18

Exactly.

Jess Vachon  30:18

Professional politicians. I'm not surprised at the outcomes. And I would think that regardless of party, if you want the most voters engaged and the best chance of winning, you'd want as many people as possible to be able to weigh in on issues — one voice, one vote. And you'd want them able to participate whether or not they have a car, or something that keeps them from a polling place. That is the great promise of democracy.

Ramon Perez  31:08

Take a look at our website. We have a supporters page where several dozen legislators and candidates have publicly endorsed our project and told their constituents they want to use these tools to be more accountable servant leaders. What it's going to take is seeing some of those people challenge incumbents and start replacing them — saying, we now have the technology for direct voter input into the legislative process, and it becomes incumbent on you to explain why you're not using it. There's a candidate running for U.S. House in Florida District 11 named Dan Williams who's taken it a step further — running as a direct democracy candidate. As long as enough people in the district vote on a particular bill to establish meaningful consensus, he'll vote however the district tells him to, every single time. If turnout doesn't meet the threshold, he'll use his best judgment based on what he knows of the district. I think we're going to need thousands of Dan Williamses across the country. We talk a lot about the 535 members of Congress, but there are tens of thousands of legislators in state houses. Systemic change is going to take a lot of people running on a platform of servant leadership and direct voter access. A junior congressman in D.C. is currently expected to spend 70 to 80% of their time dialing for dollars. They don't have meaningful access to legislation, they don't even read the bills, and they're told to vote in line with the party whip. Their job is to collect money for the party leadership. If you do your time and work your way up, maybe you'll get a committee assignment. The system of incentives is completely twisted. Some people burn out and leave. Others modify their own moral framework to stay and work the system. That's what we find.

Jess Vachon  34:51

That's a sad statement on the type of people who have staying power at that level. You would hope — and I think this is the inspiration our country is built upon — that people will do the right thing, that they have strong moral character and will stand by it. In any position of leadership, you have to know where your line is. Not just know it, but live by it. It's disheartening to hear how things actually work behind the scenes, and to think that someone in office is spending that much time fundraising — because who are they serving at that point? They're serving a party or a corporation, not the people they're supposed to represent. And that speaks to your central point: the system is broken, and we need to find a way back to what it was supposed to be.

Jess Vachon  35:59

You mentioned earlier that the project is modeled on the Wikimedia Foundation funding model. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ramon Perez  36:10

It's a nonprofit. We collect donations from the public, but this is really a community effort. I don't think some white knight is going to come in and save us. If the institutions we thought would solve this problem have started to fall apart, then it's on us. That means volunteering time — we're an all-volunteer team. All of our code is developed by volunteer coders. When we have funding, we'll pay developers to accelerate features. We have community ambassadors who help with outreach, volunteers who table at events and talk to voters, and people kind enough to donate ten or twenty dollars — or occasionally send a check for five thousand. We were intentional about being a nonprofit so there's no risk of a rogue shareholder someday saying, 'Sell the user data to the highest bidder' or 'Sell the company to Facebook.' We've also been intentional about balancing our board of directors across different political persuasions, because this is an American problem — not a Republican or Democratic one. It's a question of what kind of democracy we want to leave as a legacy for our children and grandchildren.

Jess Vachon  38:17

You've spoken about the work that goes into this and the funding challenges that come with it. What does a hard day look like as you're running this project? And is there ever a moment where you think, I'm not sure this is worth it? And when those moments of doubt come, what keeps you driving forward?

Ramon Perez  38:38

Having our funding vetoed by the governor was probably one of the hardest days. I had come into this project with startup capital and a plan, and we were meeting our targets and counting on the state to take over. When that fell through, we had to pivot. But the upside is that we decided not to limit ourselves to Florida — we'd expand to other states and include federal legislation, letting Americans everywhere participate in the process. We started verifying voters in all 50 states down to their House districts, allowing them to weigh in on federal bills and match their votes against their congressmember in Washington. We've onboarded six additional states at the state legislative level: Virginia, Washington, Massachusetts, Michigan, Utah, and Arizona. Our ambition is to be in all 50 states by the 2027 state legislative sessions. Even though that period was really tough, it forced us to get lean and made us a better organization overall. We're using Claude Code to help us build, paired with volunteer coders who validate, design features, split the work with AI, and then ship after quality control. The tooling available to small nonprofits now is incredible — not just for lowering the information barrier for voters by translating dense legislation into plain language, but also for enabling a lean startup to operate with the kind of resources previously available only to well-funded enterprises. The demand is clearly there. The more I talk to people, the more I hear that everyone is unhappy with the current system and looking for change. The options are: check out entirely — and a lot of people are going that way, stopping voting, tuning out — or reengage with the tools we now have to actually save this thing. I'm excited to see how many people are ready to get off the sidelines.

Jess Vachon  42:39

Everyone's excited about this. When I heard about the project, I thought: when can I get it in my state? I live in New Hampshire, and so much of the time I have to check the state website, discover I'm late on a bill, and miss my chance to have my voice heard. Or I have to type up an email, send it in, hope it gets read, or show up personally to testify. It's frustrating in 2026, when everything is digital, that I can't just take five minutes at home to see what bills are active, weigh in, and trust that I'll be properly represented.

Ramon Perez  43:28

You hit something important. I've spent time in Tallahassee, and the staff there handles between a thousand and fifteen hundred emails a day. Most of those, they can't verify are from constituents — or even real human beings. So much email is AI-generated now that if they can't confirm with reasonable accuracy that a message is from a real person in their district, it goes into the spam filter and is discarded. Phone calls aren't much different. And here's the other dynamic: legislators have an incentive not to be transparent. If ten thousand constituents call and ninety-nine hundred tell them to vote no on a bill, but a lobbyist walks in with campaign money and says vote yes — they're not going to publish those ninety-nine hundred calls. The incentive structure is not set up for transparency. That's what we're trying to redesign with this technology: transparency by default. The blockchain is fully auditable by anyone. We publish all results on maps on our website, showing how each district voted on each bill. There's nowhere for a legislator to hide. Some lean into that and welcome the accountability — it makes them better. Others are terrified of it.

Jess Vachon  45:36

As I've been listening to you describe the broken pieces and why traditional channels like phone calls and emails aren't working — it seems like this tool is imperative. Like the only good end to a wrong turn we've taken on the road of democracy is something like this: a floodlight into the inner workings, showing clearly whether our representatives are voting the way we asked. That's the only path back.

Jess Vachon  46:18

This has been both an enlightening and slightly unsettling conversation. Hopefully the Digital Democracy Project is going to hear from a lot of our listeners. Is there something you wish someone had told you at the very beginning of this project — guidance you had to figure out the hard way?

Ramon Perez  46:49

I had no experience with nonprofits — I came from the military and then years in the for-profit technology world. What I found quite disheartening is that so many of the foundations and funders I thought would eagerly support this kind of project have been very slow and conservative in how they invest in the democracy space. Two things work against us: first, it's a software product. Foundations have a hard time evaluating technology projects. They're comfortable funding organizing campaigns or infrastructure in the developing world, but building a software product is Silicon Valley's domain — they don't have the in-house expertise to evaluate a value proposition, understand development timelines, or assess maturity cycles. Second, anything that smells like politics, they're terrified of. The minute you mention legislators and candidates, so many foundations become paralyzed — not even necessarily by IRS rules, but by internal fear of being perceived as too progressive or too conservative. So they'll fund things that seem tangential to the actual problems of our time. I've learned some lessons about the nonprofit ecosystem that I'd be happy to share over a beer with anyone in this space.

Jess Vachon  49:03

Last question. Ripple and Root is named for the idea that every genuine act of leadership sends a ripple outward, and that the most durable change always grows from the root. When you imagine the ripple that the Digital Democracy Project sends into the future, what do you hope it touches that it hasn't yet reached?

Ramon Perez  49:21

The ripple I would find most groundbreaking: imagine a half-dozen members of Congress elected on a platform of digital democracy. People like Dan Williams, but plural. When there's a vote on whether to go to war with Iran, and Congress is split down the middle, and there are six members in the middle who are actually listening to their voters — those six people would play kingmaker on global policy. They would be the ones saying, we're not making a consequential decision like this without direct input from the American people. And that would be mind-blowing. Because then every other district would be asking: why don't I have that kind of representation? They'd be demanding their legislators give them the same access and accountability. I think that would be the beginning of something that would then move fast.

Jess Vachon  50:48

I love that.

Ramon Perez  50:49

That's what I would hope for.

Jess Vachon  50:50

That is a beautiful last sentiment. Thank you for that. The Digital Democracy Project is live in seven states. It is available to every registered voter who wants to weigh in on federal legislation. And the door is open to users, to volunteers, to anyone who believes that participation should not end on election day. You can find the app and learn more at digitaldemocracyproject.org. I want to leave you with something simple today. Every system that feels permanent was once just someone's best idea. And every system that has ever changed, changed because someone — like Ramon — decided that it needed to change and could not wait. You don't have to move mountains today. You just have to not look away. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Ramon. Until next time, everyone — be well.

Ramon Perez  51:36

Thank you, Jess.

Full Episode Transcript