A People’s Primary

In this episode…

Tom Joseph Founder - Wilson's Fountain and America's Main Street Party, joins me for Ripple & Root, Season 1, Episode 2!

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

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VIDEO: Ripple & Root S1 Ep02

A People’s Primary with Tom Joseph, Founder — Wilson's Fountain and America's Main Street Party

About the Guest

Tom Joseph is an innovator, business owner, and social activist. As the founder of Bookminders, he developed a transformative approach to outsourced bookkeeping and pioneered a remote-first employment model that prioritizes flexibility and work-life balance.

As an activist and media producer, he launched Wilson's Fountain and America's Main Street Party, introducing a new method for nominating members of Congress. With a track record of leveraging technology for societal well-being, he applies a business-oriented approach to election reform.

Full Episode Transcript

Jess Vachon: 00:32

Hello, welcome back to Ripple and Root, the show about the people who moved something and about the roots underneath the movement. I'm your host, Jess Vachon. My guest today is Tom Joseph. Tom is the founder of Bookminders, a company that pioneered remote first employment about 30 years before the rest of us even thought about it. He's also the founder and treasurer of America's Main Street Party and the producer of Wilson's Fountain, which is his attempt to rebuild away candidates for Congress get nominated in the first place. Before we start, one thing I want to say to you as a listener, this is not a partisan conversation, and I'm not going to let it become one. Tom's project targets safe red districts and safe blue districts in equal number, and that's deliberate. So, whatever you brought with you into this episode, set it down for 40 minutes. I think you'll find the argument more interesting than you expect. Tom, welcome to Ripple and Root.

Tom Joseph: 01:24

Yes, thanks so much for having me on your program. Really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this new idea.

Jess Vachon: 01:30

Yeah, excited to have you. Let me start with a line you gave us when you filled out the guest form. You said most people assume you're an accountant, but you're actually an engineer. What's the difference, not on a resume, but in how you see problems?

Tom Joseph: 01:45

Well, I look at everything as systems. And I think my approach 30-some years ago, when accountants would pretty much just take bank statements and provide data way after the fact for businesses, is I saw a need to do this on a weekly basis. And I utilized really stay-at-home moms that were accountants to deliver the service. But it was about solving a problem and putting a system in place. And I just couldn't help myself to turn it into a company.

Jess Vachon: 02:16

Can you dive into that a little bit more and tell our audience like what the issue was that you were facing and what your solution was?

Tom Joseph: 02:24

Yeah, it was my this is 1984. My dad and uncle had a small family business. They had it was they were struggling. They let their bookkeeper go. You know, I was saying, hey, a personal computer with accounting software. I mean, this is 1984, this is the Apple II, you know, with accounting software could help them out. But they were too, you know, they're actually my age now, but you know, that that was asking a lot of 60-year-olds to all of a sudden learn how to use a microcomputer. But my sister, you know, jumped in, she had small kids, and we found that the solution we came up with, you know, was really efficient. And I kind of a light bulb went off. You know, somebody working from home could probably do this for five, 10 businesses. I put the idea on the shelf for seven years. I mean, that's how early it was, pre-internet. But in 1991, when I lost my job, I just couldn't think of a better thing to do than to launch this company. And it took a long time to really get it off the ground because it was, you know, really early days of the internet, but stuck with it. And it's a sizable company, though.

Jess Vachon: 03:26

So, as you mentioned, you started on remote work, giving opportunity to workers, non-traditional workers, way before other people did. And then around 2020, the rest of the country, at least the US, caught up. What was it like being right that early and for that long and mostly alone?

Tom Joseph: 03:48

It was lone week. You know, because I was bucking a trend. You know, I remember going into CPA firms, and you know, they'd say something like, Well, it's the wave of the future. And I was like, well, actually, it's the wave of the present, you know. You know, we can do this now. And there's a lot of skepticism about some of the same things I face with the election issue, which is data security, you know, us taking information off-site of our clients. But accountants are really skeptical of the whole thing. But, you know, when you have a big problem, people are open to new ideas and new solutions. And a lot of small businesses had this bookkeeping problem. They couldn't really, you know, muster the right resources to really put a more sophisticated system in than the one they already had. So, we figured out how to scale that and leverage our experience across multiple clients. And we've actually become more of a boutique bookkeeping service. You know, we really specialize. If it's easy, most small businesses can do it themselves. But we specialize in what I would describe the Hudfudge Sunday of bookkeeping. But nonprofit organizations and complex small businesses are kind of our niche.

Jess Vachon: 04:59

Thank you for that

Jess Vachon: 05:00

Answer. And last one last question before we turn the corner and start talking about the political part of the work you do. What did you learn in 30 years of running a company? What did it teach you about people that you couldn't have learned any other way?

Tom Joseph: 05:13

Well, I mean, you really work for your employees. I mean, if you want loyalty, you have to figure out how to make them happy. We are an employee-first company. And, you know, the one thing that we do that probably know a lot of other companies won't do is we fire clients. And if our clients aren't making life easy for our employees, we value them more than we value clients. And it really paid off. I mean, we've been there's a thing in Pittsburgh called top workplaces where they bring in an outside company and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette to evaluate businesses of different sizes. And we finished second, you know, over 100 companies three times and first once. And that's a lot. And it's, you know, it's a completely numerical evaluation, you know, in terms of how they come up with that result. So, it's paid off.

Jess Vachon: 06:04

Yeah. So

Jess Vachon: 06:05

A I sense a pattern there where there's an issue, whether it's your issue or someone else's issue, you look at the problem, you go out and explore solutions, and then you pursue those solutions, which leads us to the fountain. Tell us a little bit about the fountain and why you started this during COVID.

Tom Joseph: 06:25

Yeah, Wilson Fountain actually came. The first idea was, you know, just sitting there, I was faced with knowing March of you know 2020, what is going on. And the PPP funds came available, and I remember sending them in. I kind of made a promise that if I got the money and I survived the COVID physically, financially, that I would do something. But I didn't want to run through office. And I knew kind of if I was gonna make an impact in my lifetime, I couldn't have to change any laws because my 60s. So, and that takes a lot of time. People struggle with that. So, my constraint was like, hey, is there a way to break the system without becoming part of the system? Like do it from the outside. And I wrestled with it for a couple of years, and then I kind of realized it was a I could use the entire system differently. That was really, I stopped thinking about this as being a political party and looked at all the different types of committees that were in our political committee system: super PAC, National Party, local committees, and candidate committees. And how could I restructure how those entities operate with each other to create a new primary system? And that's what Wilson's Fountain is. What happened was I when I didn't even understand that this was a founding principle. I just was about fairness. And I was I realized I had to form another entity to kind of do this research, and I was trying to figure out what to name it. And I Googled and I found this paper. It was only written at that time, two years before I named Wilson's Fountain, but four years ago, a law student out of Syracuse, I think, published something in Albany Law Review, and he found a remote lecture from a founding father James Wilson that described free and equal elections as the original fountain of democracy. And his analogy is that if we poison the well, it spoils the entire system, not just Congress. And you know, I took this to heart and said, hey, is there a way we can build a completely fair system? And it turns out we can. And also, it's not that expensive considering what we spend on elections.

Jess Vachon: 08:35

So, you know, we talk about poisoning the fountain, or you've talked about poisoning the fountain. When do you believe that that happened?

Tom Joseph: 08:47

250 years ago. Okay, elaborate. I mean, I don't think I think they got off to the wrong start. And what happened was Wilson, who was really the only person that believed in this of the founding fathers, was really on truly believed in popular sovereignty. I think the rest of them were just trying to get out of taxes. But he believed the power was in the people, and he would love the system that we came up with. But the whole idea that parties and money and that you know, people, the factions would get behind into elections and getting people elected. That's really where we started to go off course. The technology makes this, you know, more practical, but all we really needed was a sense of fairness. I think we could go back and say this is not a fair system. You know, if you're really, we have constitutions that say that elections ought to be free and equal or free and fair, they're not. Otherwise, people aren't getting re-elected like they are and able to kind of lie and do what they do without any recourse. There's no accountability, so it can't be free and fair.

Jess Vachon: 09:50

Okay,

Jess Vachon: 09:50

And you landed on the primary as the choke point. And why the primary? Why come in at that point in the cycle?

Tom Joseph: 10:00

Interesting. I mean, you really wouldn't. I mean, you really want to fix the general election, but they won't. And my solution really doesn't work in competitive districts or may not work in naturally in competitive districts. But the idea that there's misrepresentation in gerrymandered districts and that that can be exploited is really a math problem. And that was why this particular solution will be really effective in gerrymandered districts, which happens to be almost every district now. So, you know, this could be very disruptive in the sense that, you know, it all goes back to the bell curve. You know, the political thought is ideology falls on a spectrum. And you place a spectrum on a population that forms some form of bell curve. And if money distorts that representation, pushing it further left or right, a free and equal contest that occurs over multiple rounds will yield a candidate at the center of that bell curve. I mean, it's just it's like a if you run people for the hundred-yard dash and you have enough heat, you're gonna merge the fastest person. And that is really the principle behind this is that if a one-shot election favors money, and what happens when you take the money out of it and you have a hundred people competing for a position based on issues, and the district's able to weigh in and pick the person who best matches their district. It's gonna be a pink or baby blue candidate in those gerrymandered districts.

Jess Vachon: 11:31

And you have the numbers to back that up.

Tom Joseph: 11:34

It's math. I mean, it's Gaussian math. I mean, it's I mean, it's it goes way back. And what's interesting is that that probability statistics was really just hitting or being you know, coming to light around the time the Constitution was written. And I think Wilson used these words to be the what he called the true weight. I don't know something about to if everything's fair, you'll get the right weight of representation, meaning that, and I think he had this in mind. He didn't understand the math, but I think he understood that to get somebody who really was the voice of that district, it had to be fair, and it was somebody that was in the center of that spectrum. And but they didn't have the math theory back then. The other thing they didn't have was the word caucus. And the founders talked about factions. The word political party existed back there. They didn't say that Congress needed necessary political parties, they said it needed necessary factions. And they may have been describing caucuses, not political parties. And that's something that you know we have to think about is that do we really need to have division within the public, or do we really just need the division within Congress? So we're trying to design a system that at the end of the day, if you take the money out of it, you'll actually have five or six major caucuses and that they would have the appropriate ability to negotiate legislation through on a piece-by-piece basis versus this super bills, you know, presidents coming in with these massive pieces of legislation that they hope their party will get behind and they win. That's not the way the system was designed.

Jess Vachon: 13:26

Okay. So, for the layperson, we're assuming that that what you've proposed here is the way to at least create a break in the system to balance it out in the long term. Explain to us how this works exactly, because you you've talked about the math, and not all of us are great at math. You've talked about the theory behind it, but how will this work moving forward and how will people participate?

Tom Joseph: 13:55

Great. Great question. I mean, I'm approaching this like a businessperson launching a business, not like a politician launching an ideological third party. But where we are now is we have a demonstration version of this product. It is not nearly complete. We need to raise money to finish the product. But the big thing we have to do in this business analogy is attract a venture capitalist. In this world, that's a super PAC. And that super PAC would really back the concept of taking a bipartisan approach to break the two-party system. And that super PAC, we'd work together, so we've finished the software to identify an equal number of red and blue districts that we would go after that are now uncompetitive gerrymandered districts. You know, places where statistically we think we can be successful. So, we're not typically third parties or parties look for wealthy people who can fund their own campaigns and don't really think about the numbers in the districts. We're gonna really look and say, hey, there's 430-some districts out there. Let's pick 10 red, 10 blue, or 20 red, 20 blue, and take a shot at doing this. And assuming now that you live just in one of these districts in advance of the primary, and let's say this is 2028. So, it would be 2027. Late in that year, we'd say, hey, this alternate primary system, a people's primary, is coming to your district. You know, learn about it, download the app. You know, if you want to run for Congress, here's how you do it. You go to the portal, you fill this out, you get 100 people to endorse you. You, you know, you have to make the same disclosures you would have if you win, you know, if you go to so it's not gonna be super easy to enter, but it's gonna be way easier to enter than it is now. I mean, it's really restricted now to the 0.1% of people running, and but it would open it up. And the other opportunity for citizens of the district would be on the local nominating committee to actually help be the like Olympic committee to make sure that this contest occurs fairly. We want the responsibility to be out in the district. So, the national party is providing the tech, the super PAC is providing the prize money for the winner, and they're also providing public service announcements to remind people what their duty is to participate. So, the contest launches, let's say there's a hundred prospective nominees in the field. The can't the constituents will be getting advertisements from the super PAC telling them not for candidates, but to for the contest to say, hey, here's a brand-new way to choose a representative, weigh in on the things that are important. There's seven issues. If you bring the app up, you would see that there's two national, three, I'm sorry, two global, three national, two local issues that the local committees put on the ballot for the constituents to weigh in on. So, to enter the contest, the candidates have to have to answer those seven questions left, right, center, or yes, no. And so, it gives without the constituents have to do a ton of research. They could go in and answer three or four of those questions. The system returns, say, hey, these 20 candidates match your values. Endorse them all. You don't even look at them at this point. You're still way better off than the candidate you have. See who makes the top 20. You know, make this kind of like American Idol. There's profiles, bios, you know, ads that are within the system. You can see this now. I mean, we have a mock version of this with it's a PA1 and PA2. One's a blue district, one's a red district, where you can go in and see. And we have it weighted that the conservative district will be primarily conservative candidates, and the blue district would be primarily liberal candidates. But you by picking issues, you can elevate and you can see that a liberal person in a conservative district would be able to push the more moderate candidate. They'll have a voice. They won't be able to get a liberal, but they might be able to get a pink candidate and disrupt the other party. And there's so much hatred towards the other parties. You can see that one of our approaches would be hey, let's get the people who are voiceless off the bench and have them weigh in. You know, that they won't, again, they won't get a Democrat in a red district, but they'll get maybe a less conservative pink representative and make the system more fair. And if we can equal the turnout in our alternate primary to what comes after the public primary, which is only about 100,000 people, and we're going to do this targeted, I think our person can come in as a favorite because you say, hey, this person survived a gauntlet, you know, and they were chosen by you, and they're running now against the, you know, the lackey for the party who is always putting party before you.

Jess Vachon: 18:47

Because if we look 25, 30 years ago, you had more of those middle of the road candidates that would move some things forward. And the thinking at that time, and I think both parties agreed about this, is that you know, it's better to make some progress than no progress. Is that some of the thinking that you have on this?

Tom Joseph: 19:08

Yes. And that, you know, decades ago, politicians still relied on their local money to win their elections. Now they rely on the support of their party whips. So, you know, we don't really lose our vote on election day. We lose our vote when the party big legislation comes up and party whips say, hey, you vote the way party leadership wants to, you're not getting your primary money. And that's where the system is broken. You know, so what we go through on election day is kind of the motion. You know, what really happens in Congress is dictated by a very small percentage of people that donate a lot of money. It's like 0.01% of the population's that's making these decisions. It should be us.

Jess Vachon: 19:50

So why not go after the rulings that said that you could have the super PAC money come in or have these single individuals come in or corporations come in and sway directions in in their favor? Why not why not attack it at that level?

Tom Joseph: 20:06

They've been at it for a decade. You know, we can do this now for a little bit of money. So, I'm there like, hey, while there's a super PAC available, let's take advantage of it. And yeah, I've written the line that a politician would have thought it was a good idea to place in the system something with infinite power, but an engineer would have advised you otherwise because we can use that tool and turn it on their heads. And you know, and for a little bit of money, I mean a little bit of political money, like a hundred million dollars. I think we could disrupt 40 districts. And you know, maybe we don't get 40 out of 40, but you know, if you run 20 red, 20 blue, I think we'd get half, maybe more.

unknown: 20:42

Right.

Jess Vachon: 20:43

And that's just at this point.

Tom Joseph: 20:44

That's just enough attention to get it. Yeah, I can't. Yeah, not only that, the election of the speaker of the house moves in the main chamber. As soon as you get enough people that aren't part of either party that they can't elect, you know, basically agree on the speaker outside the chamber, they have to move it inside. It means that they're it moderates the speaker. There's no way that the whole chamber would agree on a party leader, it'd be somebody from a swing district. It that's the way it's supposed to run. And that really would make that would that be historic. And it's really cheap compared to what they're doing to overturn Citizens United.

Jess Vachon: 21:22

They're spending hundreds of millions of dollars and they're not getting anywhere very fast. Because maybe they don't want to get anywhere very fast. Gridlock works for them.

Tom Joseph: 21:33

Well, the hey, if the politicians wanted to overturn Citizens United, it'd be overturned. I mean, if the Democrat and Republican Party were behind this, they love it. They love Citizens United. You know, it's really the people that hate it.

Jess Vachon: 21:48

So how are you going to keep the super PAC, for lack of a better term, clean? How are you gonna make sure that there's not an undue influence from those that are funding the super PAC?

Tom Joseph: 22:01

Well, think of it. This is interesting. When I came up with this idea, the very first question came with the attorneys. What if somebody comes in? What's influenced? I said, Well, what number one, they don't deback a candidate until the people choose. So, they have no weight in picking the candidate. The other thing is that if somebody's like a big oil person, they put money in the super pack, well, it's being spread across 20 red, 20 blue, or 10. So if you have a partisan interest, this is a dumb super pack to put your money in. So that's, you know, and as soon as they, you know, we went through this, the attorneys are like, wow, the only real way to beat this is to either ungerrymander the districts or get rid of super PACs. I go; I take either. But they won't. I mean, I to me, I think they won't. I mean, I think, and also the reason Supreme Court ruling means that if they got rid of super PACs, if the money's donated directly to the party, we could effectively do the same thing that we could back the candidates. So, they're making it so the parties can more directly name candidates. Right now, the Democratic National Committee can only spend so much money saying the name Kamala Harris. And same thing with the Republic. You know, they can't, they're restricted. Other than that, it's get out the vote. And now they're bringing down those barriers. That's why get out the vote is what they do, because they can't name the candidates that they that are on the ballot. That's my problem. I can't, I can't, I don't have money in the party to advertise the party, and I can't spend money privately to advertise for the party. So, like anything, if you go to Wilson's Fountain, it never mentions the party, it'd be illegal. And so, if I do anything under Wilson's Fountain, I don't mention the party. Like people have to kind of figure it out.

Jess Vachon: 23:53

So, you have candidates that are selected by the electorate in the primary. You go a couple rounds; I assume you get down to one candidate who's going to be represented. What does the funding and support look like at that point? Does it just stop after the primary or does it continue?

Tom Joseph: 24:13

No, so what happens is that, and we're working with a couple election law firms, that the nominating committee is a local committee, and it won't need require funding to operate. And we envision, you know, once we're in a district, that we would this would almost be like a permanent operation. But there is the possibility that that there's something in the federal election regulations called a test the waters committee, that this committee can roll into the candidate committee and actually be the fun initial funding for the candidate. But in the structure, we've designed, the local committee, the treasurer, is somebody will be the treasurer of the candidate committee, and they'll either spend that money down or return it to the local committee. That the candidates are not allowed to accumulate a war chest, and they're not allowed to donate more money than any other citizen. Right now, if you run from office and you're a rich person, you can put unlimited funds into your own campaign. Even though that might favor our candidate, we think that's a bad rule. And so, we're kind of implementing in our system all the rules we think ought to exist in the election system and make it fair. Because I think at the end of the day, it's going to benefit you by having better candidates. That, you know, people that aren't just about being rich, you know, and it's supposed to be government of the people, by the people, for the people. You know, why don't we do that? And I think one of the ways you do that is that we're going to make a rule, just say that, hey, I don't care if you could put 10 million in, you're only allowed to put 2,700 in. That's the same as your neighbor. And that this is the way the system ought to work. And if you want to be part of the system where you buy office, there's two parties that love that. Go join them.

Jess Vachon: 25:52

You chose 20 and 20. That seems like an interesting number to pick. 20 solidly red districts and 20 solidly blue districts. Why, why not 30 or 10 or some other number?

Tom Joseph: 26:05

Attrition. So, you know, I have to assume that there's going to be attrition that occurs through this, that of the districts we pick, some of the districts aren't going to buy in. And one of the options we're going to give the super PAC is that if the primary is a flop and you don't get public support, the super PAC can pull out. You know, that the public is going to be on the hook to support the primary. Let's say they reject it and know it, say that, sorry, you know, you have to earn the super PAC support. So that is attrition there. And the fact that, you know, some candidates, like what we've seen, don't turn out to be the person that we thought they were. I think at least in this system, we can say, hey, the second-place person is going to be pretty close to the first-place person. So, we could just sub them in. And but we do expect that there's going to be things that come out about candidates that didn't come out during our system. So, some attrition there. But we want to make sure that the end of the day that we've got, you know, enough people that in one shot we disrupt the house. I want to make sure that as that people look and say, hey, if I donate 10 bucks to this, these guys have a shot because they're doing 20 and 20 or 10 and 10, something where it's sufficient. Right now, the numbers are so close, maybe you could do 10 and 10. But initially I just thought with attrition, success rate, if you want to get down to winning five to 10 on each side, you know, you got to start with 20.

Jess Vachon: 27:29

Okay. So is my understanding a lot of this has been built out by college students. I think some of the colleges were Penn, Drexel, Temple, Haverford, Swarthmore. And you're putting this intellectual property into the public domain. Tell me about both those decisions to work with college students and to put the IP in the public domain.

Tom Joseph: 27:48

Well, one, you know, I've made my money. So, I'm not this was really a pay it forward initiative for me. So, I knew anything I was doing for this. Number one, I thought it'd have a lot more credibility, too. If this was not something that, you know, everything in the political committee belongs to the public, and everything I'm doing at Wilson's Fountains for a public domain. But the reason I picked college students is, frankly, they're the only ones who worked with me. You know, the graduate students didn't even want to work with me. Nobody, I couldn't, I two years once our election law firm figured out what I was up to, they conflicted me out. It took me two years to find an election law firm that really wasn't so tied to either party or both parties that they would work with me. It was like finding a unicorn. But the college students were affordable, smart, and not painted to think that this was gonna fail. You know, so I wanted people that are so green that they didn't realize we were tempting the impossible.

Jess Vachon: 28:50

Was there anything you learned from the students from having them in this exercise that you didn't expect?

Tom Joseph: 28:56

Oh my God, everything. I mean, they delivered so much more. The Chauncey, who may have contacted you to set this up, has been working on this for a couple of years and you know, came up with a brilliant design. He's it's funny because he's not a software guy, but you know, took his political science knowledge and came up with a really clever way for us to allow the public to kind of find these candidates quickly. His issue matching system is really, but there's a bunch of different ways that people can find candidates through the system. But the fact that they there was so much that he knew and other people on the project knew that educated me, that was that was a great learning

Tom Joseph: 29:35

Experience.

Jess Vachon: 29:37

So, something that's not clear to me is this are you creating a third party? Is or is it just a pathway to one of the two existing parties? And if it's a third party, you know, the country's had a history of a third party splitting the vote. Can you address that?

Tom Joseph: 29:54

Well, like I said, it's it is a 527 committee, is the predecessor for a national party for us to qualify as a national party. There are certain things that we have to do that we can do under the context of being a software company. You're supposed to have a national convention, ours would be like a user’s group meeting, you know. So, we think we can qualify as a national party. And once we do, we would be able to put people right on the ballot. That's the advantage. Once somebody wins this contest, we have to go out and actually get signatures to get them on the general election ballot as an independent. They wouldn't be under our brand until we qualify as a national party. But the splitting of the vote actually is something that occurs in swing districts. You know, we're only going into districts where we can't be a spoiler. So, we're looking at districts where the winner is consistently winning with at least two-thirds, like 70 to 80 percent of the vote. So, there's enough opposition votes there, like 20 to 30 percent that they're worth going after, but not so much that they have a shot at putting a candidate up. You split 70 and a half, you still get 35, and then the other party only has 30 percent. So, you know, we're looking at again, this is a math thing. There's so many districts out there to pick from, and a lot of them have been gerrymandered in this very specific way that there's gonna be a lot to pick from.

Jess Vachon: 31:17

Is this potentially an electoral college play? I mean, if we look farther down, so if you have just enough votes that you're shifting a gerrymandered district, then you have the potential right to change the electoral college vote if we're talking presidential.

Tom Joseph: 31:35

Yeah, I that's a whole nother conversation. I actually believe we have not implemented the electoral college the way that James Wilson designed. The language of in the describes the House would represent as the exact same language that describes the Electoral College, meaning he believed that each elector shouldn't be tied to the state results. I mean, it's not popular sovereignty in terms of the way he defines it. So, I think he'd be a little appalled to see how we've implemented the electoral college. And if you get back to doing it the way, there probably were a number of elections that it looked like the electoral college may have come out the other way if it was done the way he had designed. The other thing is that he thought that the Senate would should be proportional. So, the fact that the Senate's not proportional kind of skews the Electoral College to say that, you know, in a situation like in 2000 and 2016, the Republicans won the House and they won 30 governorships. So, the fact that maybe that's if it's really close, maybe that should be the tiebreaker. I, you know, as much as I didn't like those results, yeah, is that better than when there's three or four candidates, somebody with 34% of the vote who's extreme, winning over, you know, maybe equally moderate candidates that split the rest of the nation's vote. So, you got you know, two-thirds of the nation that's really moderate, but they just happen to split their vote across, you know, these three candidates, and then you have this extreme person who had not even close to the majority of the vote. So, we're we only think about this two-party mindset, but the founders were thinking about what happens in these situations. And the Electoral College is really designed to resolve that. And that's what happened the first time Jackson lost. He said it was a corrupt bargain. Wilson would have said that's the system working the

Tom Joseph: 33:20

Way it should.

Jess Vachon: 33:22

That's a good point. So, this is based upon participation of people in these districts coming out. You're asking them a lot of people who don't vote to show up. You're asking them to use technology where some people are technology averse. You know, if you look at the older generation, some of them are adopting technology, but some prefer the old way of voting. How are you going to adapt this for that full spectrum of voters and encourage voters or people who don't vote to actually participate? Well, let me flip it.

Tom Joseph: 34:14

And so, yes, will this system not be conducive to a part of the population that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller? Yeah. And you know what? They'll be able to come to kiosk or locations. But if we can connect with the people who are technology sophisticated and target, like said, a district and market them and get them excited about it like a new product, I think we can outdraw the primary. So, we don't have to meet general election numbers, we just have to meet primary numbers, which are getting worse and worse. So, from that standpoint, it's really all about perception. You know, that if we can say, hey, this our person won, our primary, if we had 110,000 constituents participating, and that person won the and they had 90,000. You know, we have a shot. This is a real candid. And I think the current system, if somebody goes into that primary who's an independent or new person, they got to bring down the incumbent in one shot and they have no street cred. You know, this will give them street cred in the district that they survived this contest.

Jess Vachon: 35:24

So, I want to flip this question. I targeted the groups that might not be technologically savvy. Now you have some groups that are technologically savvy. How are you gonna keep this from being gamed or flooded with people who don't live in the district?

Tom Joseph: 35:40

Well, they won't be able to get in. It's a private contest. So, you have to match. We're we've been working with a couple organizations. One digital democracy project has implemented technology called Votes, and we've worked with Ramon to make sure our app will adapt to votes. Votes is a secure mobile voting platform that's actually used in in the military for people who are, and it's being it's being used more and more, but it basically ties you, it turns your mobile device into a ballot box. It ties your ID to a voter record that makes sure you're a citizen in the district that you can only vote once. And it's this has been used since 2018. So, it's eight years mature. I mean, people aren't aware of how far we've come with secure mobile voting technology. And it's being used in other countries, and we're just not taking advantage of it here. We're not here enough.

Jess Vachon: 36:37

Why do you think that is?

Tom Joseph: 36:41

I think that there's pushback from the establishment because the more people that participate, the weaker the two-party system gets. And I think that they're always pushing back on these reforms because they the more people participate, the easier it is to kind of remove people that will serve the people. I mean, they like the system the way it is now because the primaries are uncompetitive, people don't turn out. If you have, you're an incumbent and you have money, you're likely gonna win the primary. And if you're in a gerrymander district, there's no contest in the general election. So, you win this really small contest and you win a hugely important seat.

Jess Vachon: 37:27

So as you've been pursuing this project, what's the most serious objective objection you've gotten? And did it make you go back and change anything?

Tom Joseph: 37:39

Number one, there's like two audiences here. There's really audience where I'd say that people that have podcasts are regular people, you know, not people that are tied to the political ecosystem. And I get very little objections here, at least ones that I can't easily defend. Like people, the security thing comes up a lot, but people just aren't aware of how far we've come with that. And basically I'm saying that, hey, we're gonna implement something that's probably even more secure than what you have at the state in your local municipality. A lot of these devices are more than 10 years old. I think some of the original issues that people had about being concerned about the internet might have been valid 20 years ago. But now people are Venmoing and MGM gambling and you know doing all these things, banking, you know, and two-factor on that. This is, I think we're gonna find in most of these districts, you got at least 100,000 people that can manage this technology. I think way more.

Jess Vachon: 38:41

Let's assume that this is successful when it's launched. You get through the first year of doing this. What do you see as the evolution of it? What does it look like in the second or third go-around? And you know, this is probably going to be a long, long road. What would you hope 20, 30 years down the road, that that people look back and comment about this effort? What do you hope they'll say? And what do you what do you what do you hope that the nation will be using as an election system?

Tom Joseph: 39:15

I have a six-year plan. In 2028, like I said, 20 red, 20 blue, that we basically disrupt the house. In 2030, that we were in those districts and more, and that now we're looking at the Senate and being in enough and probably have to go over to small state because the larger state, the big it is. But small state, since it's about capturing market share, you know, we could, it's just easier to capture market share in a smaller state. But basically being competitive in the Senate. And by 2032, do we have enough people that download it, have access and excitement for the app that we can have a national nominating contest for president that has nothing to do with money? That if everybody weigh in on the same days, you know, California, New Hampshire, Iowa, you know, that that we eliminate on a national level and will feel down to a top candidate in a moneyless nominating contest. And they'll go up, they won't that'd be a serious, you know, competitor if they went through a national primary that played out over like a World Cup for a nominee.

Jess Vachon: 40:26

So I think I heard a little element of this in what you said as well. Do you see the primary process shrinking, becoming faster and quicker, and moving us to the to the candidates much faster? And what are the benefits of doing that?

Tom Joseph: 40:42

Well, think about that. You know, you had Lindsay Graham just died. You know, we could run a little special election, multiple rounds, do it quick. But you know, the pe it people will pick. It won't be somebody saying, hey, I think it ought to be Lindsay's sister. I mean, you know, this is ridiculous. The founders hated inherited power. This idea that just because you have a name that you get re-elected, or you have money that you get re-elected, that they thought was just awful. And so that's why they didn't have a House of Lords. They wanted a Senate.

Jess Vachon: 41:17

So, you're obviously someone who doesn't look at things as being impossible. Where did you get that from? What well do you draw from that sustains you on those challenging days?

Tom Joseph: 41:28

Well, I mean, starting bookminders, you know, that seemed impossible. I'd launched helped launch a charter school, not just a charter school, a multi-unit charter school. And the Pennsylvania charter school law is designed not to, they more or less said that you have to have a separate board for every school that you have. So, we came with this idea, well, you know, if we want to have eight schools, we're gonna have to have identical boards and have a simultaneous board meeting. It turned out it's legal. So, we actually, you know, even though we have like at eight entities, we managed it like it was one entity at one board meeting and published eight minutes. But it's just kind of a clever way to get around the law. So, I think that I'm looking at this like, hey, technology disrupts markets every day. And if I try to launch this as a third party, it's an impossible task. But if this is an insurgent technology disrupting the market, this happens every day.

Jess Vachon: 42:20

All right. And last question. If this works in 10 years, someone's in Congress because of the process that you helped build. What thing do you hope is different about that person?

Tom Joseph: 42:32

I hope that the whole system is different, that the rancor goes away, that we that this works as you know, a civil organization is supposed to work. What we have now is just a pathway to civil war. And, you know, to me, having a person won't change it. I mean, having, like I said, a different system where there's balance is really what I'm about. I tell people I'm not a conservative or a liberal, I'm a Libra.

Jess Vachon: 43:06

Well, thank you for joining me today. Tom, where should people go to learn about this project and also to actually participate to help do something?

Tom Joseph: 43:15

Yeah. Mainstreetparty.org. I mean, the thing that we want is, you know, money is helpful, but traction is more important. Spreading the word, you know, getting on more shows like this is fantastic because that there's a obviously a ripple effect, and that's what we want.

Jess Vachon: 43:30

Tom, thank you so much. This has been super informative for me. I feel like I have a better understanding of the project and how to participate. I'm sure others who listen to this will feel the same way. I would encourage everyone to go out and participate. That's what this show is all about, and that's why we feature leaders such as Tom, people who are out there making changes in the world that we live in. Links to everything that Tom mentioned will be in the show notes. If this episode gave you something to ponder, please like the podcast and share it with others. I'm Jess Fashion thanking you for listening. Until next time, bye everyone.

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..

Tune into the audio version of this episode by clicking the player below:

Tune into the video version of this episode by clicking the YouTube player below:

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.

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