Podcast: Catching up with Adam Jacoby, founder of MiVote

Adam Jacoby first presented MiVote at a DOD gathering in Melbourne. This catch-up interview — recorded 20 July 2021, during Melbourne's pandemic lockdown — is an honest account of what happened next: the spin-out mistake, the rebuild, and where MiVote stood after nearly a decade.

Note: the MiVote page in the Democracy Landscape documents the original 2014–2019 model in detail — the four-destination framing, the university/expert/ethics information pipeline, the constitutional mandate binding its senators. This post picks up the thread afterwards: the Horizon State fallout, the rebuild, and the UK chapter. The Australian party deregistered around 2019; the movement and technology continued under a different structure.

What MiVote actually did

MiVote's core design insight was to reject the binary. Rather than asking citizens yes or no on a policy question, they offered four choices — structured as "destinations" rather than specific legislation. The framing was: which direction do you want your government to go? Each choice came with a research-backed information pack explaining the trade-offs.

Critically, no direction could become policy without 60% approval. Their contention — which sceptics said was impossible — was that four-choice, well-informed voting would produce genuine consensus in a polarised environment. They ran five or six votes. They never once failed to reach 60%.

"Everybody that we spoke to said it wasn't possible to do it, and you could never get any significant percentages of support… We ran five or six votes. We never, ever had less than 60%." — Adam Jacoby

One caveat before leaning on that figure: MiVote's votes were approval-style — voters could, in Adam's words, "vote for as many or as few as you want" of the four options — so 60% approval for one direction is a lower bar than 60% of voters choosing it alone. And those who voted were self-selected MiVote users, not a sample of the electorate. Neither point undoes the result, but both matter when comparing it with a referendum.

The 60% threshold argument is the most transferable idea in the conversation. Adam's case is that 50%+1 majority voting is structurally designed to produce tribal outcomes. Raise the threshold, expand the choices, give people information — and you find a community willing to agree on a direction even when they disagree on everything else.

The Horizon State mistake

MiVote's early technology was built in-house, led by Jamie Skella — described as the first blockchain voting platform in the world. Rather than keep it internal, the board decided to spin the technology out as a separate company, which became Horizon State.

The agreement: Horizon State would always build for MiVote first, and a percentage of revenue would come back as donations. MiVote kept no shares and no board seat.

"It was the single worst commercial decision I've ever made in my life." — Adam Jacoby

Horizon State didn't honour the agreement. MiVote had no recourse. The result: five years and hundreds of thousands of dollars lost. By the time of this interview MiVote had rebuilt its technology in-house as MiVote Technologies — this time as a for-profit entity under the same umbrella, housed in the UK.

The lesson Adam draws is about the relationship between the technology and the mission: keeping them integrated, with the right legal structure, matters more than optimising for a clean spin-out.

Trump as inflection point, Taiwan as benchmark

Adam had spent years warning that democracies were "edging closer and closer to something that looks like fascism." He says Trump's rise validated the argument publicly and brought new people to MiVote who had previously dismissed his concerns as hyperbole.

On comparative models, he singles out Taiwan as the best example of citizen-based policy-making operating at scale — but with a fundamental flaw: participation is self-selected. Only the citizens who show up shape the outcome.

"You're still in the exact same problem that a lot of these models have, which is you're not finding a way to engage the citizenry in any meaningful way in terms of volume, that you can say this is genuinely representative." — Adam Jacoby

Taiwan's model has since been discussed at length on the DOD site: see Taiwan's digital democracy experiment, which reaches a similar conclusion about vTaiwan's unresolved gap between deliberation and binding outcomes.

Where things stood in mid-2021

At the time of recording, MiVote was operating out of the UK as part of what Adam called the UK government's "PEG program", which incentivises overseas technology ventures to domicile in the UK; he said MiVote was "the first not-for-profit ever to be invited". (We couldn't match the departmental details as transcribed to a UK scheme; the closest fit is the Department for International Trade's Global Entrepreneur Programme.) Joydeep Mondal (formerly head of MiVote India) had become global CEO. A contract was signed with a member of Federal Parliament in Australia to run a series of votes in his electorate "over the next six months", and Adam described similar work with the EU and with union movements across Europe.

Adam was also writing a book — Mythocracy — whose central argument was that democracy and politics are mutually exclusive in both philosophy and practice.

Detailed notes

A fuller, timestamped breakdown of this recording — who said what, transcription corrections, and claims worth checking before repeating them — is kept in the site's repository next to the transcripts: analysis notes. Speaker labels there are inferred from the automated transcript, not checked against the audio.