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Podcast: Catching up with Adam Jacoby, founder of MiVote

This post was drafted by Claude Code with AI-assisted research. A human editor partially reviewed it for general accuracy. Verify specific claims against the linked sources.

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 said it wasn't possible, and you could never get any significant percentages of support. We never, ever had less than 60%." — Adam Jacoby

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 Skeller — 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 — 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 the UK government's Entrepreneurs Programme (PEG) — the first non-profit invited. Joydeep Mondal (formerly head of MiVote India) had become global CEO. Trials were underway with a Federal Parliament member in Australia, with the EU, and with union movements in Europe.

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

See also