This ALTERNATIVE gives the people a VOICE even if the government ignores it, everyone will hear it.
So a grassroots effort is appealing to people that want a VOICE, that want CHANGE, and that want the government to adopt what we have produced.
Now we can offer an alternative, "Don't vote at the polls, file a protest vote at FMV".
I hope it works. I really do. But I see VOTE's primary utility as being a trustworthy system that is easier for people to use than traditional voting methods. And I think it will take some media spotlight to really highlight that. In the U.S., the next real opportunity would be the U.S. Presidential primaries in Spring 2016. If California is a test case, where I happen to live and work, then ballot initiatives provide another opportunity to test this out, but again that test will not come until the Fall of 2016, since every interest group in this state is waiting until then to run its next round. I think BitShares VOTE is a longer term proposition.
Your suggestion that FMV can be a protest vote instead of real voting is dangerous. Anyone who opposes us will feed that line to the media and they'll eat it up alive. Also, if you think politicians will listen to votes here, when someone has given up voting at the polls, that's an approach I cannot support. How is that different from ~70% of young people being in favor of legalizing marijuana (according to national public opinion polls in the U.S.), but few of them bothering to vote in elections that count? That's EXACTLY what the corrupt politicians who have passed all these voter ID laws want younger people to do: pack it in and stop participating. Advocating that is wrong.
Encourage people to do BOTH (vote here and there) and you'll end up with more votes here. I think will happen longer term, since VOTE will be more user friendly, and still trustworthy. And there you have a winner: this is a better system that can produce a higher turnout. THAT's what this has going for it.
As for politicians taking note of growing numbers of people making their opinions known through BitShares VOTE, we have public opinion polls for that, and they still don't care, because the half of those people who want things different don't vote anyway. I don't think that the added reliability of a blockchain is going to add that much weight in most peoples' minds to what could just as easily be surveyed (by pollsters who account for demographic variations and produce a pretty accurate snapshot).
Very few politicians have national constituencies anyway. They are looking at voters in the state/province or population-based district they represent. A candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Georgia doesn't care what I think in California, just as a member of the House of Representatives in Texas is going to listen only to the people in the few counties that are in his/her district (which, by the way, is drawn by a politically motivated crowd and probably skewed so that the politicians already knows he/she represents an extremely liberal or conservative set of constituents). They'll discount it anyway unless they know who is making the votes (down to the age, gender, party registration, and all that). If it's mostly oyunger voters, then that's a very partial snapshot. Are BitShares VOTE voters going to be demographically broken down to that point?
Listen, I want you guys to go for it. I'm rooting for success here. I have high hopes for the VOTE feature. But without understanding the thing very well (which I admit), I think the best prospects are long term and I don't see that as a primary way to get people into BitShares DAC.
As a "cornerstone" of marketing, I think those BitShares TV videos are a far better use of time.