Ramon Perez:  You could write a letter, you could send an email, you could call the switchboard. The reality is that you have no idea what the legislature does with that information, if anything at all. And I've spent enough time in Tallahassee or on Capitol Hill to see that these guys are overwhelmed with emails because they're form-filled and now a lot of them are AI-generated emails. And they go into spam filters and they get ignored because they cannot verify that these are actually people in their districts.
Carolyn Ford: You know that moment when you see a bill or hear about a piece of legislation and you just think, "Absolutely not. I have got to do something about it". But then the options of what to do seem kind of futile. Email, write a letter, make a phone call. It doesn't feel like it's really going to move the needle. I care. I have opinions. I want my representatives to feel it. I often or rarely know what to do as an engaged citizen.   In this episode of Tech Transforms, I'm talking with Ramon Perez. He is the founder of the Digital Democracy Project and co-founder of Shore Voter. Ramon has spent time on the inside with legislators and he knows exactly what happens to all those emails and letters and phone calls that we send. Often they truly are futile. He's building tools that are in use now that let citizens show up in a way lawmakers can't easily ignore: verified voters, real-time maps of district sentiments on specific bills, and public scorecards that track whether or not our representatives vote the way we ask them to. So, instead of yelling at the radio like I do, we're talking about how to plug directly into the legislative process, actual democracy, and turn that sense of futility into actual leverage. Ramon, tell us about the Digital Democracy Project. Tell me how it came about, what problems you're trying to solve, and if it's being used anywhere yet.
Ramon Perez: Yeah. So, the idea with Digital Democracy Project is we are using modern technology, mainly mobile voting software where you can vote from your phone, except that we're using it for a different purpose. We are not a supervisor of elections. We're not holding a binding election with this technology like some states have started doing. We are letting people vote on legislation that's being debated in Congress and letting their legislators know how they want them to vote on the floor in the chambers. So you can directly tell your legislator how you want them to vote. We provide the results in real time in maps on our website. So, not just legislators, but media, everybody in your community can see what the community, what the district wants from Congress or from their congressman. And then at the end of the session, we compare what did people want in the mobile app to how did they vote? How did your congressman vote on the floor in the chambers?  What I think makes this possible is that mobile voting software is now real and is being used in binding elections. It was invented by the partner company that we work with named Voatz. It was invented for military voters overseas to cast an absentee ballot where it's very difficult to get a ballot through the mail. So if you're a submarine under the ocean during an election, that's tough to get mail service. If you are a special forces in the Horn of Africa, tough to get the postal service to you. And I was a military officer myself for 13 years. I had been overseas during more than one election. I recognized how difficult it is to vote for military members, especially in deployed environments where that's a challenge. So when I started working in AI and machine learning for the last dozen years and I got connected through my work to the CEO of Voatz, I immediately recognized the value of what they'd created, obviously for military members, but also for the broader public: to be able to vote on your phone and have it be cryptographically secure. You can identify someone—their face and a selfie matches their driver's license or passport, just like you would with Venmo and a lot of other banking apps. So matching their face to their ID and then finding them on the voter file and then having a system that's cryptographically secure so you have a secure vote token. It's got a blockchain backend so that when you vote it's captured on the blockchain to make certain that nobody can manipulate it. It can't be tampered with by hostile foreign governments. The vote that's cast is the vote that's counted and it's being certified in several states. And I was like, "Wow, if you've done all of this, then why do we have to wait every couple years for people to have a say in their government? Why can't we create something like the Netflix of government and just bring government directly into people's pockets, right? Put it in their phones and let people have a say all the time on all the issues that matter to us". So things like we've carried the Iran War Powers Resolution. We've carried the ICE funding bill. We started this in Florida and so we started with state-level legislation, but now we're doing seven states at state-level legislation. But voters in all 50 states can vote on what's happening in Congress and tell their legislators how to vote. So, that's how we got going—mostly around learning what the technology could do and then saying, "Wow, there's definitely greater purpose in this beyond that limited use case for military voters".
Carolyn Ford: So, I have so many thoughts right now. First of all, how long has it been available to vote by phone? And it sounds like it may just be for military service members, right?
Ramon Perez:The states that have been using this have been using it for military voters, and that's been going back to 2018 actually. I think West Virginia piloted this first. It was a Republican Secretary of State actually who did it first and then now some Democratic Secretaries of State. So it's truly been bipartisan in that sense because military members—it's not a partisan question. So they've been trying it out for this particular use case because military voters actually have some of the lowest turnout because of the challenge of voting from overseas. And you have to get your ballot in months in advance in some cases in order to get it reliably delivered by the time that it needs to be there. So this was meant to solve this narrow problem, but some states are now using it for people with disabilities who have trouble getting to the polls. Especially visual impairments where it's tough to use a touchscreen. So the accessibility features on your iPhone are incredibly valuable, right, for somebody who's wheelchair-bound or who has trouble leaving the house or who has trouble using, you know, visually impaired. I believe it was Nevada or New Mexico—one state is piloting it for tribal reservations because it can be hundreds of miles to a polling location. And actually the Canadians are going a step further. So in Ontario, they've announced that they're going to use the Voatz software for all municipal elections. So anybody can just vote by phone as an option.
Carolyn Ford: Thank you, Canada. That's where I want to be. Like, I'm trying to get—right now this morning, I'm trying to track down my primary ballot. I didn't receive it. Part of it is user error, but I'm just thinking why? Like, especially the way you describe the security behind it. It sounds a lot more secure than a mail-in ballot. A mail-in ballot seems a lot easier to tamper with than what you just described, right?
Ramon Perez:And look at how long it's taken California to count those mail-in ballots during the last election, partly because you have to check everyone's signature against their signature in the DMV system. And I don't know if people completely realize when they're at the DMV signing that little screen that that's their binding signature.
Carolyn Ford: No, because I just do this. And when I sign on paper, I actually write my name.
Ramon Perez:Yes. And so this has become a real problem because absentee ballots are meant to match that signature and a lot of them don't and they're getting rejected or turned into a provisional ballot. People have to come in anyway and verify their ID. Mine's getting rejected every time, Ramon. Every time. It's a real challenge. And with mobile voting, the Voatz app actually does have a digital signature. You just turn your iPhone sideways and then sign it with your finger like you do on a lot of DocuSigns now. So, it's the same kind of technology. I would say it's increasingly making a lot of sense because it solves problems that Democrats have raised and Republicans have raised. It's one of the rare bipartisan things. I've spent a lot of time in Tallahassee talking to a lot of the legislators there, including the chair of the committee that oversees voting. And in Florida, it's a Republican-run state. And the concerns about absentee ballots are actually, to your point—people feel there's too much opportunity for somebody: gets your absentee ballot, signs Grandma's ballot.
Carolyn Ford: I started taking mine to a polling station and putting it in the mail slot myself. My friend, a good friend Trace Bannon, has told me, "No, Carolyn, you need to go vote in person". I'm going to share with her because she's a big technologist. I wonder if she knows about Voatz because I think she would be a proponent, too. So, what is the holdup? What's the roadblock from making this available to everybody?
Ramon Perez Well, politics—let's be honest. I think that's why it's gaining greater adoption in Canada right now. Actually, Mexico used this for their national election. So any Mexican citizen outside the country could vote absentee using the Voatz mobile app. Hundreds of thousands or a million or so Mexican citizens voted by phone because they were outside the country. Increasingly we're seeing that other countries are passing us in their ability to evolve the system of democracy, not just with the voting mechanism itself but in so many other ways. Our system is kind of falling behind. We're not maintaining the edge in innovation in democracy like we are in other aspects of our economy. Mainly because our political system is such a wreck.
Yeah. And it's hard to get any compromise or debate or dialogue on anything at this point. Well, and so to that point, I started with really the second half of my problem: getting my ballot, getting it in. The first half is what Digital Democracy is solving. The first half is, "Who do I even want to vote for?" And once I vote for them, are they doing what they said they would do?
Carolyn Ford: And I mean, I'm just thinking right now. I need—we need this app here. I'm in Utah. I want this now. I want this today to help me stay informed and to help me. So, tell me more about Digital Democracy. Does it also give you information about what's being voted on first and then you vote?
Ramon PerezAbsolutely. Yeah. Great call. Because at the very beginning, when we started testing this in 2022 and then first went live in the Florida legislature in 2023, we were just putting in links to the bill on the Florida legislative website.
Carolyn Ford: No, that's not going to work for me.
Ramon PerezExactly. People were like, "Oh man, it's so hard to read and understand. I need a video, please".
Carolyn Ford: Yes, that's right. And I need to be entertained.
Ramon PerezExactly. Well, the bills are written by lawyers for lawyers. They're not written for us. They're meant to be adjudicated by some judge somewhere and it's complex details referencing subsection F, paragraph 4. It's impossible. It's like reading a lease before you sign.
Carolyn Ford:  Well, I'd rather follow a real estate contract. That's right. I follow two girls. It's called Elevate Utah. And they break it down for me. They use sticky notes and I follow them on Instagram.
Ramon PerezYeah, you've got to be able to explain these complex concepts, right? So at the beginning, what we were doing is they're like, "Okay, well, it's not going to be enough to just put the legislative bill, the totality of the bill. That's too much".
Carolyn Ford: That should also be there.
Ramon PerezWe have it. We link to it because we want people to have some confidence that it is the real thing. Like, here's the state website. And then we would have a Republican and a Democrat read the bill and work on summaries together that were nonpartisan and factually accurate and then we put that into the app. But that, of course, is a ton of work on our side too because we were going through thousands and thousands of pages. So actually once AI came onto the scene, it became incredibly powerful for us to have AI read and summarize the bill and then our team will review it, make sure it didn't hallucinate. In the early days, there was a lot of hallucination.
Carolyn Ford:  I was just going to say, I've tried this with AI and it gets it wrong. It leans into the wrong stuff and sometimes it just gives inaccurate information. So, you've got a human review?
Ramon PerezWe have a human review in every single one of them to make sure we fact-check it. Sometimes also the summaries from an AI are just so bland that they don't really tell you anything of any use. So, we have to really dig into the details. And so we've recently, a couple months ago, launched Votebot on our website, which is a chatbot where we load in hundreds of thousands of pages of legal text directly into its database. And then you can ask it detailed questions about, let's say, "How does the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' affect food stamps? I heard about something in the news. Is that actually true? Or where do you find it?" And it can point you to the section that says, "Yes, this is going to increase food stamps' work requirements," or whatever, or it'll increase ICE funding, and point you to where in the bill that language comes from.
Ramon Perez:  So I think that's really valuable for people because so much of our information comes through these media bubbles and ecosystems that are now algorithmically derived by social media. It's hard to know what's real. Oftentimes journalists will report on what's most salacious and skip a lot of the other aspects. And we want to get people back to that basic understanding of, "Here are the facts. Here's the black and white of what's in the text," and now you educate yourself and make up your own mind. 
Carolyn Ford: And then once you are satisfied that you feel educated, you can tell your legislator what you want them to do on this piece of legislation. That's our public service because we are a nonprofit organization. So education is a big part of that because for so long I think we've been led to believe that our job ends at the ballot box and that the people we send on to Congress or to our state house are smart and capable and they're going to have the staff and the time and the resources to read these bills and make good judgments. And I think what we're increasingly finding is that that's just not true.
Ramon Perez That's right. A junior congressman spends 70 to 80% of his time "dialing for dollars". They don't read legislation because they're actually being expected to vote the party line. So the leadership is going to craft the bill and the leadership team will have people working on it, and then the rank and file is just told to vote the way the party wants them to vote.
Carolyn Ford: So they get very little time, and honestly Congress has been cutting their own legislative staff resources for 30 years now. So they don't even have enough money to pay to keep people who are high-quality people who understand the legislation and are writing the bills. And that's why lobbyists run circles around these guys—because all the most talented folks leave to go to lobbying aid companies because they can make three, five times as much money writing the legislation for a private company.
Ramon PerezSo this is the situation we find ourselves in. And what we need to do is acknowledge that now we have the tools as individual citizens to actually understand the implications of these policies and make an informed decision and have a role in the process of debate and deliberation and consensus finding that Congress seems to be incapable of doing at this point.
Carolyn Ford:  Right. Well, and to be able to do something. I've been frustrated often and very recently—I don't know if you've heard about the drama that's happening in Utah with Kevin O'Leary's data center. It's made national news. Well, they tried to sneak it in without informing the public. We got wind of it and right now it's up for debate because the people got wind of it and, man, we banded together. But when we first heard of what was going on, it was really hard to even know what to do. Like, people say, "Oh, well, write your congressperson". Right, well, okay, that takes some effort and kind of a lot of effort, and you're not even sure if it's getting to the right place. So this app... and where in Florida are the legislators? Do you find them paying attention to it? Is it making a difference?
Ramon PerezTwo key things there. One is that, as you rightly stated, you could write a letter, you could send an email, you could call the switchboard, right? The reality is that you have no idea what the legislature does with that information, if anything at all. And I've spent enough time in Tallahassee or on Capitol Hill to see that these guys are overwhelmed with emails because they're form-filled and now a lot of them are AI-generated emails.
And they go into spam filters and they get ignored because they cannot verify that these are actually people in their districts or that they're even human beings and not just AI at this point. So they don't trust the inbound emails because it could just be an Astroturf campaign, and a lot of them look very similar. That's why they think they're mostly Astroturf campaigns.
And they don't actually have great tools. In the Florida legislature, they're quite literally using Microsoft Outlook spam filters and spam folders and just categorizing them with names and such. I mean, it's wild. And so we are providing a service to the legislators in the sense that we are verifying identity upfront so that all they have to do is look at a map and say, "Well, that's what my district wants on this bill," and, "I know that these are real people because they've done a photo ID, they've been matched against the Florida voter file," and so I know that they are actually registered to vote in my district.
Carolyn Ford:  To have some confidence of that, right? That's a value to legislators—free public polling is a real value because they normally would spend 30 to 50 grand to run a single poll, and they're certainly not going to poll every bill. And now you're crowdsourcing it for them.
Ramon Perez Exactly. So, the legislators get something out of this and that's why actually we had a bipartisan appropriation from the Florida legislature for our project. We had a senior Republican out of Ocala named Keith Perry and a junior Democrat out of Orlando named Rita Harris who worked together, got it through the entire budget process. The budget committee chairman, a guy named Alex Andrade—very conservative Republican out of Pensacola—approved it and they pushed it all the way into the Florida budget until Ron DeSantis line-item vetoed it and killed the funding.
But basically, we had a bunch of Republicans and Democrats supporting us. But we've had Republicans and Democrats who don't like us also because the one thing that we offer to voters is the accountability aspect. Yes, we are giving free public polling to legislators, which they like, but at the same time, we're now saying at the end of the session, "Did you do what the people asked you to do and how often?"
So, every one of them gets a scorecard that's like a baseball card. It just basically shows how many bills we carried and how often they matched their district. And it's quite a simple methodology. It's just a bunch of up and down, and you get a percentage based on how many thumbs ups you had across time, and over hundreds of bills you get a real trend line to see who's doing a good job of being accountable to their district and who isn't.
And both Republicans and Democrats have objected to this because they don't like their scores and have come after us for that. And some of them got to the governor and had our funding killed or whatever. But that's the thing: it's not inherently—we are designed to be nonpartisan and you're going to find some legislators who are just inherently servant leaders.
They exist in both parties. They went there for a reason. They believe in the purpose of what they're doing and they want to be good servants of their community. And if they're a Republican in a red district or a Democrat in a blue district or somebody in a purple district, whatever—that's irrelevant to us. As long as they are serving their voters, that's what matters.
And some people immediately resonate with that. And there are other legislators who have the mindset that, "Well, people chose me and they should trust my judgment and that's the way it is. Like, I'm the one here, not them," basically. So, they're not in the room where it happens. "What do they know?" kind of a thing. And those folks exist in both parties, too.
So, that's why I would say that we feel good about that we can do this in a way that is nonpartisan and factually accurate and provide a platform to voters. What I think we're going to need is more people running for office who are those servant leaders and are willing to dislodge incumbents who are not doing a good job of being accountable to their districts.
And we're now seeing that where we've got—if you look on our supporters page—we've had dozens of endorsements from legislators or legislative candidates who are saying, "I want to use these tools to do a better job for my district, and I want to be held accountable to the results". And so, they're endorsing the project and saying, "Yeah, I want to do this for the voters".
We actually have one guy named Dan Williams in the Florida 11th district who's going even a step further. He's running for Congress under a direct democracy platform. He's saying, "If I get enough voters to vote in the app on a given bill," whatever that is—a thousand people or whatever his threshold is—"If I get enough people from my district who say, 'I want you to vote X,' I'm always going to vote X. Whatever my personal opinion, it doesn't even matter if I have enough people participating to represent you".
Carolyn Ford:  I love that. We're going to take a quick pause to thank the sponsor who makes these conversations possible. This episode is sponsored by Owl Cyber Defense, a pure-play cybersecurity company delivering "Made in the USA" data diode and cross-domain solutions trusted to protect some of the most sensitive government and commercial networks worldwide. Owl enables secure, near-instant collaboration across network boundaries, helping military, federal, and critical infrastructure organizations make faster, safer decisions. To learn more, visit owlcyberdefense.com.
Carolyn Ford: I'm Carolyn Ford. This is Tech Transforms and I'm here with Ramon Perez. He's the founder of the Digital Democracy Project and co-founder of Shore Voter. We've been digging into how a broken overseas voting experience and a career in AI led Ramon to rethink how democracy should work in a digital age. And just before the break, we were talking about turning that frustration into a real platform.
And what I want to do now is Ramon, if you can, will you share your screen? So, listeners, if you can pop over to YouTube, you can see what Ramon's doing. But Ramon, as best you can, narrate this so people listening can follow along as well.
Ramon Perez So, I was talking earlier about the "One Big Beautiful Bill" because a lot of people have heard of it. It was a pretty significant landmark piece of legislation last year. So how we do this is that we track legislation as it's moving through Congress, coming out of committees, because we want to try to prioritize the bills that are going to get a vote on the full floor of the House and Senate.
The reason is because, one, if you look nationwide, there are literally hundreds of thousands of bills between all 50 states and Congress that get drafted. A tiny percent will actually get a floor vote. Something like less than 1% will make it to the floor for an up-or-down vote.
 So, a lot of our legislative tracking team is really focused on which bills to put in front of voters in the mobile app or on our website so that we don't inundate people with a bunch of bills that are never going anywhere. So, we want to prioritize the ones that are.
So we—I mentioned—we provide summaries of the bills. We provide links to the original text of the bill—this will be on congress.gov. We provide a link to vote on this bill in the Voatz web app. So I can actually click on that right now. And this would—you would see it would take you to Voatz, which is... you would have signed in here. You would have verified already or you would go through this process and verify with your photo ID and find you on the voter file. But then once you've got the account and everything, you would vote inside the Voatz system.
We provide organizational positions. This is a thing we started doing because a lot of people are really interested in understanding who's behind the bill, who's pushing it forward, who's against it. Understanding that helps people kind of inform where they see, you know, do they align with AARP, for example, or the Chamber of Commerce? Maybe that helps them decide which side of the bill they think they should be on, right?
Or the AFL-CIO. This was a big one. This was a high-priority bill. So, this has tons and tons of different organizations. You could click on any one of these and you could see the Chamber of Commerce and all the other bills that they have gotten behind or opposed, right? Some folks find that to be useful in informing themselves.
We've also got a tool where people can go and kind of crowdsource their thoughts on the legislation. People can add to this and say what they like and don't like about a particular piece of legislation. So, it's a bit of a crowdsourced debate tool. And then as people are voting, we provide updates on the map, you know, how they are around the country.
You can zoom in on a particular state. We'll go down to Florida. I picked a bill where everyone is showing up as being opposed. So, that's not a great example, but—yeah, let's go up to... I want to show further down we can actually see how the representative voted. If there's a gray bubble, that means that we don't have anybody from the Alaska one who's voted in the app.
So, we started this in Florida. We're now rolling this out nationwide. We've had about 24,000 people get verified in the app, but most of them in Florida. We need to get people in all 50 states now that we're doing Congress. So, if you take a look at the House or the Senate, you can see how did the district vote—whether that's the Senate or the US House district—how did their legislature vote, and how often did those match?
You can go down and compare each one, and the bill itself gets a score showing that 52% of the time the representative matched their district on this particular bill. You can also talk to our little chatbot here and you could say, "All right, well, what are some pros and cons about passing this particular bill?" And it'll always give you the legalese saying, "We don't take a position as Digital Democracy Project, but you should, and here are some things that you can think about".
"And here's some status about the bill. Give me a summary of this bill. What is it telling me about?"Agriculture, nutrition, defense and military. Okay. But I want something more specific. So, "How does this affect food stamps?" And what it's going to do here is actually going to read the legislative text directly out of its database because we load all the bills into its knowledge base.
So you could say, "Yeah, major SNAP changes in HR 1. It expands work requirements for able-bodied adults for under 18 and over 65, for young adults". Okay, so there are some exemptions for veterans, for homeless, etc. Here's a link to the bill and here's the page, right? It's congress.gov. It's on page 19. So I can go verify it for myself.
Carolyn Ford:  So is this response right here—is it AI-generated or has it been human-reviewed?
Ramon Perez This response is directly from the bill text and it is AI-generated.
Okay, but that's why we force it to provide the links to the source so that way, you know, you can jump out and verify if anything looks weird. But yes, that is AI-generated. These summaries up top—these are "human in the loop".
Carolyn Ford:  Okay. So, super easy interface. Let's play devil's advocate for me for a minute. You mentioned the security behind Voatz. We've got blockchain. We've got facial signature matching. It sounds super secure, but how many times has it been hacked?
Ramon Perez Yeah. So, the Voatz team tells some interesting stories about how many times it's attempted to be hacked. They did the plebiscite in Venezuela. If you remember when Juan Guaido was challenging—because the National Assembly stated that he should actually be president of Venezuela because there was a falsified election and Nicolas Maduro had him arrested. There was a whole process.
So the US government worked with the National Assembly to sponsor a plebiscite which allowed Venezuelans who could prove their identity using their voter registration to vote on who should be governing Venezuela. And they used the Voatz app for this because the Maduro regime was not about to have an election. They weren't going to be allowed to use their regular election equipment and the Voatz app was used and there was a significant effort by Russian intelligence to hack and manipulate the results that was defeated in that process.
Because the outcome of that election was so important to the Russians and to the Maduro regime, there was quite a lot of effort put into cyber-cracking the Voatz app. So it has been put under pretty significant stress tests and it's been StateRAMP certified by several states that are now operating it for military voters or voters with disabilities. It's been certified by the government of Ontario in Canada where it's being used for municipal elections.
We partnered with Voatz because Voatz has a track record and has been doing this for binding elections now for several years—eight years?
Carolyn Ford:  Eight years. Yes.
Ramon Perez Right. There was a New York Times article from six years ago where an MIT research team was able to get an older version of the Voatz app that was no longer in the app store and they were able to crack that older version of the app, but because it was an unapproved, outdated version of the app, it was never able to put votes onto the blockchain.
I think the main risk is getting control of the phone itself. If you're able to use phishing attacks, using social engineering attacks that we're well aware of and get access to somebody's phone, you could theoretically cast a ballot on their behalf, but it still uses Face ID and Touch ID biometrics.
So, as long as the user has the Face ID or Touch ID turned on on their iPhone—actually, I think the newer version of the Voatz app requires it—you would still need to either have that person's fingerprint or PIN code or face to multi-factor authentication. It's biometrics both when you log into the app and then when you go to submit a ballot, it double-checks the biometrics again before you hit send so that it's consistently making sure that nobody took control of your iPhone and is trying to vote on your behalf.
So that's what the MIT researchers team tried to do in 2020. Voatz has introduced a bunch of the things that I just talked about, like biometrics, as a result of that. So in the last six years, there's been a lot of investment and as a result a lot of the certifications have gone well. You can see the audit results on their website. I'm not here to speak on their behalf because they're a private commercial entity and they can do that themselves. But I do think that the technology that is fundamental to what we do... it is 
Carolyn Ford:  Right. Okay. So let's get really crazy for a second. What if we move to the next step where Digital Democracy is actually voting on the bill for us? So we're crowdsourcing by the people choosing how we want to vote on this bill and that's the way it goes down. Like, let's remove the legislature altogether or use some AI agent? I don't even know why we would need the—I guess we need the AI agent to actually place the vote—but whatever the popular vote is, that is the way it happens.
Ramon Perez You could theoretically do that as long as you get enough scale and you've got millions of people participating so you had enough of a representative sample of each district. Because as I mentioned, we have 24,000 people verified, but they're scattered into different districts. So to actually get a thousand people plus to vote in a specific district means that those are going to be the high-priority pieces of legislation.
It's not going to be renaming a post office or a highway. It's going to be "One Big Beautiful Bill". It's going to be the Iran War Powers Resolution. It's going to be these marquee pieces of legislation that have significant impact where you could get enough people to participate that you could get enough critical mass to say, "You know what? That should be the vote". It should basically be an election for every bill.
Or in like my home state of Florida, we use ballot initiatives. People vote on legalizing marijuana or abortion access or any number of other topics. California has been doing this for years with ballot initiatives. So there is a process for direct democracy in America already. So it's not an unusual concept.
It's just that they're expensive to run. They're very, very expensive as a result of a lot of legislative manipulation. They're very expensive to get a ballot initiative onto the ballot in the first place. So we are basically turning every bill into a ballot initiative. And if you had enough participation where you've got tens or hundreds of millions of Americans participating, you absolutely could make it a binding vote. There's no reason why you couldn't.
Carolyn Ford:  Yeah. I'm just thinking about it still requires those tens of millions of people, like you said, to participate and to think about it. And maybe there's a lot of people that don't want to. Maybe they do just want to elect their representative and trust that they will vote for them the way they want them to, or to even tell the people what they want, right?
Ramon Perez I think you're right. For some people it's "fire and forget," right? They just want a "better mousetrap". They don't want to replace the concept of a representative. They just want the representative to be accountable to them and not to the lobbyists and the special interest groups and the party bosses and the campaign finance process and all the people that stand between us and our legislators.
Most people would argue that's the problem, not the legislators themselves. And when you actually spend a fair amount of time with legislators, I think you actually come away feeling pretty badly for them that they're sort of stuck in a system of bad incentives. They all recognize how bad it is and they would all love a better way to do this where they don't feel like they have to be accountable to the people who can fund a campaign, which is where they are right now.
A lot of them that I talk to love the idea of getting back to basics and just being a servant of their community, which is what they went there for in the first place. So, I honestly think that if we could just solve that problem, most people would be absolutely satisfied with that—voters and legislators.
But yes, you know, there's no reason why, technologically speaking, you couldn't have... let's say you reached enough critical mass where a significantly important piece of legislation like whether to go to war in Iran—you could hold a plebiscite on that. The technology allows you to do that and ultimately the people should decide whether or not we carry out something of such significance.
But for most pieces of legislation, people would be happy to defer to their representative to handle those things as long as they feel like their representative is accountable to their community.
Carolyn Ford:  Yeah. Because even looking at Digital Democracy, it does make it a lot easier and more accessible, but you still have to ultimately decide: am I going to give it a thumbs-up or ask my legislature not to vote for it?
Ramon Perez Right. Looking ahead as AI agents start helping people understand Digital Democracy or respond to legislation, how do you envision AI participating in democratic systems without replacing human judgment and accountability, or do you think it's going to?
I have been working in AI now for 12 years and I can say with a lot of confidence that it does not. In all the projects I have worked on and all the different businesses where we've implemented it or for government or whatever, it just has not replaced people. People keep thinking it's going to "come for my job". The reality is that what it's done is replace certain tasks that were kind of repetitive and annoying that people don't like to do, but it actually gives people more time to focus on sort of the creative and challenging decisions that people need to make.
Ramon Perez So what I've often taken to calling it is "augmented intelligence," not artificial intelligence. The idea is that the tools work with us to make us better, faster, smarter. We are inundated with information. It is impossible to keep track of it all. Just understanding what's going on in the news is hard enough.
And what it is, is a way to sort of sift and sort through that and bring to light the things that are most important to you so that you can make decisions every day without feeling like you're drowning. And that's just as true for an individual trying to consume what's going on in global events versus a company that's trying to understand its customers or versus a government that's trying to understand its citizens.
The tools are incredibly powerful for helping us find insights, but it doesn't take away or alleviate our agency and our need to be the decision-makers. And I just think it's the same in democracy as it is in all the other places that AI is going to disrupt.
Carolyn Ford:  Why shouldn't AI be a tool for public good in what we're doing rather than always being seen as a tool that's going to put a bunch of people out of work? The reality is the tools are just tools. It is ultimately up to the person behind the keyboard or the person in the boardroom making the decision on how to use those tools that's going to determine whether it's going to be used for good or for evil. And we as a public service organization want to use these tools for public good.
Ramon PerezThat's right. It's a choice, and AI is here to stay. I think we all can agree on that. 


Carolyn Ford:  All right, I'm going to take us to our "Tech Talk Rapid Fire" questions. These are from the gut. Don't think too hard about them, but they're just fun questions. If you could give every citizen a tiny AI civic sidekick on their phone, what is the one thing that you would want it to do for them during an election year?
Ramon Perez Gosh, they already have it. It's called Perplexity. If you're not using Perplexity already to learn the news... I'm telling you, again, it's not for me to promote some private company, but just being able to sort through the headlines and understand what's important might be the most powerful thing that AI does because we get so much bias in the way we get information.
And that's what I use Perplexity for every morning: just tell me what's in the news because it cuts out so much of, "Oh, do I have to determine if this is a right-leaning or a left-leaning organization or what?" and it just gives me the facts, and I love that about it. So I would absolutely use that just to be an informed citizen.
Carolyn Ford:  I use Perplexity every day too. I have never thought about using it that way. You just gave me one of my new habits. All right. Which sci-fi version of digital government feels eerily plausible for you, or any movie version? And which one do you hope we never get anywhere near?
Ramon Perez I think it's the one you actually kind of mentioned, which is sort of a utopian environment where every one of us is running our government. We're just using the tools of the day to allow us to do that. I think that there are so many problems that we can solve where we know the answers.
There are so many things in which 80% of Americans believe: in term limits, or want to see a resolution to like climate change or guns, or any number of these issues. We have consensus in the society and we can't get to it because of our broken political system. So I actually think that a truly participatory government—as much as it seems sci-fi today—I think 25 years from now it's going to seem quite quotidian.
And you have enough faith in the people in mass to do the right thing? And when I say "do the right thing," choose what I would choose?
I don't know if they would always choose what I would choose, but I do try to tell our team that we need to believe more in democracy than we believe in our own opinions. I think the people in mass... there's a great book called "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki that you should take a look at because it actually shows there are so many examples in economics or in history or in a variety of different... betting markets are a good example of this, where a large group of unbiased individuals actually make better predictions and come to a better consensus than a small group of supposed experts, because of the risk that those experts become captured and biased. And I think that's the challenge we're having with our Congress and with our state legislatures right now.
Carolyn Ford:  What's the book again?
Ramon Perez It's called "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki.
Carolyn Ford:  Okay, I will put it in the show notes. So, see, you've given me something for my reading list. This is the best morning ever. Okay, last question. If Congress had to steal one practice from high-performing software teams, what would you pick?
Ramon PerezOpen source. Yeah.
Carolyn Ford: Ah, yeah. Open source. Yeah.
Ramon Perez I think that that's one of the gifts that the software developers have given to the world that goes really underrated is the idea that you can actually build and co-develop great intellectual property that nobody owns because everybody owns. It's a brilliant concept and it's also led to the decentralization of things like blockchain, where you've got essentially a bank where there's no bank, right? I mean, it's doing the job of a bank when there's no bank in the middle.
I think that concept of decentralizing and open source is one of the great gifts from the software engineering community.
Carolyn Ford:  Spot on. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us. Where can our guests connect with you?
Ramon Perez Yeah, just go to digitaldemocracyproject.org. We've got all of our social media handles at the bottom of the page. You can also email us at info@digitaldemocracypro.org. This is an all-volunteer team.
So, if you are a software developer, especially if you work in Python, we could use your help—or JavaScript, we could use your help. If you are a legislative wonk and can help us track bills in your state capital or in Congress, we could use your help. If you are an organizer or an activist who's connected to the different nonprofit groups and different organizations that can promote bills and get people engaged on a particular bill, we could use your help.
And honestly, if you're a person who could write "big checks," we need donations. We use it to pay our server costs and our software licenses. We don't have any permanent staff. So we spend all of our money on the technology to make this thing work.
So you know, it's going to take all of us as a community to decide that our democracy is owned by us, and every single one of us has a responsibility to play in building and imagining the next version of democracy for the next 250 years.
Carolyn Ford:  Fantastic. Oh my gosh. You gave me my reading list. You gave me some fantastic calls to action. I love it. Thank you, Ramon.
Ramon Perez Well, I appreciate you having me on. And I will say one thing before we close, which is: we're going through this industry consolidation where we're going to have like three billionaires running the entire media. And I do think that the work you guys do in independent media is going to become increasingly critical for helping spread new and interesting ideas. So, I'm really just glad to be on and have a chance to talk to your audience.
Carolyn Ford:  Well, thank you. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this episode valuable, be sure to share it, leave a review, and smash that "like" button to help us reach more people who could benefit from the conversation. I'm Carolyn Ford. Tech Transforms is produced by Show and Tell and sponsored by Owl Cyber Defense. Until next time: stay curious and keep imagining the future.