August is supposed to be a slow month but it has turned out to be a busy one for me. The new book, published on August 1, has led to a lot of marketing activities. Following are a few things I would like to make you aware of:

• Terry Brock, an Orlando based professional speaker, interviewed me about Robot Attitude. The YouTube video of the interview is here (or just click on the play button above.
• Amazon has created two new series pages for “It’s All About Attitude”. If you visit any of my book pages on Amazon, you will see a link to the Series page. You may be curious to take a look. The Kindle series page is here and the paperback series page is here.
• The first “Meet the Author” – “Book Signing Party” was held at The Boiler Room in the Hawley Silk Mill on Thursday evening in Hawley, PA. This is near our summer home and where we have many friends. It was a nice turnout. I explained AI and machine learning in a way I hope all will remember. The topic seemed to hold the interest of the audience and they had a lot of great questions. A donation of $300 to the Wayne County Library was made with the entire proceeds of book sales. There will be more book events in Connecticut and Florida over the next six months.
• The Crowdfunding campaign for Wifigen going on at Wefunder.com went public this week. Wefunder sent an announcement about this to its 250,000 members on Thursday morning. Status of the campaign is at wefunder.com/wifigen.

Now, I would like to switch gears to the world of electronic voting. There continues to be a great deal of misunderstanding about the subject. Secretaries of State are petrified about the possibility of being hacked by foreign actors. There are reasons to be concerned, but there are ways to make elections by mobile devices safe, secure, private, and verifiable. Only one of the 20+ presidential candidates (Andrew Yang) to date have had the knowledge and strength to talk about mobile voting. I am not advocating for Mr. Yang (or any political candidate), but I am advocating for mobile voting.

The real issue which only Mr. Yang has talked about is the huge number of people who could have voted in 2016 and 2018 but did not. That number is 100 million people. Perhaps 10-15% of those eligible voters were apathetic or did not like any candidate. However, most of the remaining 85-90 million people had difficulty with our 150 year-old voting system. They were sick, too frail to go out in the weather, on assignment overseas, busy taking care of parents or children, given last minute work assignment, or any of a long list of reasons.

The solution is not to revert to paper forms and the USPS. Especially for overseas soldiers, they have learned paper ballots are not reliable and they believe their ballot may not get counted unless there is a tie. West Virginia, Denver, and Utah have conducted pilots with mobile voting. Participation increased and voter satisfaction was high. It can be done and it can strengthen our democracy.

Some recent coverage offered strong criticism of Senators who were also presidential candidates, and who missed 30-40% of the votes taking place on the Senate floor. In one case, a Senator missed 90% of the votes during a quarter. The reason they missed these votes is obvious; they were on the campaign trail. The question to be asked is not why they didn’t vote? The question should be why can’t Senators vote from their smartphone while on the campaign trail? (or if they are bedridden with illness)

Enabling mobile voting for 100 million people has many technical challenges, although I believe it can be done. Implementing mobile voting for 100 Senators should be very easy. The Senators’ identities are known. There are no privacy issues since their votes are made public anyway. Each Senator’s smartphone identification # can be uniquely recorded in a Senatorial voting database. The problem is not technical. The problem is Attitude. Requiring the Senate votes to take place “on the floor” is old-fashioned to put it mildly.

Bill Gates famously said in a 1994 speech at a Bank Administration Institute conference, “Banks are dinosaurs, they can be bypassed.” … “Ninety-four percent of bank boardrooms,” he explained, “have never had any professional experience with technology in their career.” In a world which is increasingly all about technology, we should demand our Senators get with it.