Ramon Perez & Dan Williams: Launching Digital Democracy in Florida's 11th

Ramon Perez, Executive Director of the Digital Democracy Project, returns to Bald Ambition six months after his first appearance, and this time he's joined by Dan Williams, a Democratic candidate for Florida's 11th Congressional District, who built his entire campaign around Ramon's technology.Williams, a longtime Disney technologist and current mobile app instructor at Full Sail University, built his own direct democracy app before discovering the Digital Democracy Project already existed and had solved the hardest part: secure, verified mobile voting through Voatz, the same system used by military voters overseas. The two partnered up, and Williams built his entire platform, Ask America, around a genuinely unusual pledge. For every major bill, he will release a plain-facts educational video explaining both sides, hold a district-wide vote through the app, and then cast his official Congressional vote however the majority decides, regardless of his own personal opinion.Perez and Williams walk through the mechanics in real detail: how voter identity gets verified against state voter files without the campaign ever storing personal data, how the votes get recorded on a blockchain using homomorphic encryption so no one, including Perez and Williams themselves, can see how any individual voted, and how AI now helps the Digital Democracy Project translate dense, deliberately confusing legislation (like an 1,100-page bill) into plain-language summaries with real pros and cons.Underneath the mechanics, Perez and Williams make a bigger case: they've created a concrete answer to a problem most people only complain about. Perez traces today's dysfunction to gerrymandered districts and low-turnout primaries dominated by ideological extremes, leaving most Americans feeling unrepresented regardless of who wins. He argues that transparent, verified voter input at true scale hasn't existed since ancient Athens, since direct democracy never scaled past the city-state until now. Both point to corruption: a lobbyist can buy one undecided vote, but nobody can buy 800,000 constituents, so a representative bound to district results becomes structurally insulated from Washington's influence. The pitch answers two of the most common complaints in American politics at once: that money buys outcomes, and that nobody's really listening. The conversation also digs into the campaign realities of running this way: losing PAC support because Williams can't guarantee his vote to anyone, the challenge of explaining a genuinely new idea to voters used to picking a side, and why Williams believes a centrist, transparency-first platform gives him a real shot at winning a heavily Republican-leaning district that traditional Democratic campaigns have lost for thirty years straight.The GuestsRamon Perez is the Executive Director of the Digital Democracy Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses secure mobile voting technology to let verified constituents weigh in on active legislation, then compares that input against how their representatives actually vote.Dan Williams is a Democratic candidate for Florida's 11th Congressional District. A technologist and educator with a 25-year background at Disney and current faculty at Full Sail University, he is running on a Direct Democracy platform built in partnership with the Digital Democracy Project. Florida's primary election is August 18th. Get out there and vote, and check out their tech: Learn more: https://digitaldemocracyproject.org Follow the campaign: https://danwilliamsforcongress.comSend the host a text! Let him know what you think Support the show