"Local news worth reading" — The New York Times
SUBSCRIBE
The independent voice for West Orange County news
A computer technology professor at Full Sail University, Dan Williams’ forte is making complex concepts accessible. And fewer things are more complicated than how the U.S. government works.
“A lot of people think that the government is very confusing, and they want somebody who's able to educate them about it,” Williams told VoxPopuli in a recent phone interview. “You get a little bit of government in like high school, but then you don't get it for the next 20 years, except you're supposed to know how it works, and you're supposed to know all these laws and all these different departments, and it's impossible.
“I think we need to do a better job about explaining how the government works, what the actual bills that we're trying to pass do, what the good and the bad is — not focusing on political party messaging — but truly what does the bill do, and then take a vote on it.”
Williams, 47, calls his plan Ask America. Supported by the Digital Democracy Project and accessible through a secure app, it allows constituents to signal support on the bills being considered in Congress. It’s operative now. And Williams wants to see it in wider use. But first there’s the Aug. 18 Democratic Primary where he faces Royal Webster II, a Winter Garden teacher; and James Pericola, an advisor during the Clinton Administration.
VoxPopuli wrote about Williams’ direct democracy idea and profiled him in January.
Here, he answers questions from VoxPopuli and the News Collaborative of Central Florida.
Corruption. Our government is broken, and the remedy is radical transparency through Direct Democracy. Instead of pretending that one person can perfectly represent 800,000 distinct voices without continuous input, I am shifting the power back to you.For each major bill we try to pass up in D.C., I will create an educational video for it. The video will explain exactly what it means to vote yes or no. It will contain only facts and no political party messaging. At the end of the video I will include my opinion, which will be clearly labeled, about what I think is best for our community. I will then turn the decision over to the district. Using the Digital Democracy Project and the secure Voatz platform, constituents will vote directly on the bill, whatever the majority opinion is will be my direct vote up in Congress. This system ensures continuous accountability and builds an unbreakable wall against special interests. Currently, a lobbyist only needs to influence a single politician to pass a law. Under my platform, they would have to convince 800,000 everyday citizens. I am running to be your direct voice in DC.
Technology. Washington has a serious tech-literacy problem. Out of 435 members in the House of Representatives, only five have any background in technology. Yet, this body is trying to regulate AI, crypto, stablecoins, and digital privacy. The lack of expertise shows. As an engineer and a web development professor, I am uniquely qualified to bring real-world technical competence to Congress. Technology is driving our future, but we must establish smart, solid laws that actively protect workers and safeguard our citizens.
Education. I have spent over 20 years in the classroom, teaching everything from fashion design to computer programming, and I fundamentally believe that our schools are the foundation of our future. We must fully fund our education system, pay our teachers the competitive salaries they deserve, and ensure higher education is accessible to everyone. Currently, over 40 million Americans are crushed by student debt. We need to implement a zero interest loan program so that people can invest in their futures without getting trapped in lifelong, inescapable debt.
I am a good fit for the FL-11 seat because I am bringing a fundamentally different approach to representation. People are disenfranchised with politics for many reasons, but the one I hear most is that they feel their votes simply do not matter and that they have no real impact on what happens in Washington. I felt the exact same way. I am not a career politician. I am a concerned citizen who has simply had enough and is willing to step up with a new plan to fix the system. This frustration inspired my platform of Direct Democracy, which gives every person in our district a direct say in our shared future. It is impossible for a single individual to adequately represent the diverse beliefs and values of 800,000 people. My plan takes the politician's ego out of the equation: my personal opinion counts exactly the same as everyone else's. I do not intend to speak for you; instead, I plan to be a megaphone with you, so we can amplify our community's voice into one clear, powerful demand 6 . It is time to modernize how Congress works at a foundational level.
Affordability is a huge catch-all. Anyone trying to attack it all at once will not make a dent. I plan to use the exact system I teach my students when they are trying to tackle a big problem. You break it down into smaller pieces until you can actually start solving them. The little wins will add up quickly and bring real relief to all Americans. The first five buckets I would break affordability into are healthcare, housing, daily essentials, the care economy, and the hidden drain.Healthcare is broken and has been for a while. We need to work our way toward Medicare for All. I am perfectly willing to take small steps, but this remains my ultimate goal. A very good start would be to repeal the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. We saw some slight reforms in 2022, but we desperately need more. Currently, the law binds the government's hands when it comes to negotiating prices for drugs and services. Changing this would create a price anchor, which ends up lowering prices for everyone.Housing: We have a really good start on this one with the new 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. It actively lowers housing costs and increases the available housing supply.Daily essentials are basic things like groceries and gas prices. The most recent hikes on these items have squeezed working families harder than almost anything else. To tackle this, we need to crack down heavily on corporate price gouging and stabilize our supply chains. Doing this ensures that a sudden disruption somewhere else in the world does not instantly double the cost of basic goods here at home.The Care Economy: Childcare and eldercare are currently bankrupting families and forcing talented people out of the workforce. We need to expand child tax credits and offer incentives for local businesses to support community childcare options. Making care affordable is not just a family issue. It is a critical economic driver that helps get people back to work.The Hidden Drain: This is the affordability killer that sneaks up on you. It is death by a thousand cuts through junk fees, hidden bank charges, and predatory subscription models. We must mandate absolute transparency in pricing across all industries. If a price is advertised, that must be the exact final price you pay. Stopping these hidden drains will immediately put real money back into the pockets of everyday Americans.
I will be voting no on the proposed amendment to slash property taxes. In the short term, it looks like a great way for homeowners to save some money. However, our county's needs are not simply going to vanish. We still need funding for the fire department, police, parks, and libraries. To make up the difference, I have heard discussions about raising the sales tax. This is a horrible idea. A sales tax hike affects lower-income families more than anyone else because daily necessities become much more expensive. If this amendment does pass, I would counter it with a local referendum. That referendum would restore those lost funds and put control back in the hands of our local government. Right now, I am actually working with the Lake County Braver Angels to create a bipartisan informational website. We plan to share this with everyone to explain what this amendment really does. It will break down its true cost and show exactly who will end up bearing the brunt of the burden.
I believe we need to stop building new data centers until we elect leaders in D.C. who understand how to fix the problems they cause. Right now, these big companies use tricks and loopholes to skip important environmental checks. This has to stop. They must be forced to follow all the rules to protect nature. They also need strict contracts. If they need more electricity, they must pay to upgrade our local power grids themselves. We also have to watch their water use very closely. They must be forced to use systems that recycle their water. This is the best way to make sure data centers do not ruin the freshwater under Florida.
I view environmental challenges through a technical lens. Long term, our biggest priority must be renewable energy. Energy drives modern life, and we need to simultaneously lower its cost and aggressively pivot away from polluting fossil fuels. In the short term, however, the most pressing environmental threat to Florida is extreme weather. Because of this, FEMA must be fully funded immediately. We are right in the thick of hurricane season, and without sufficient federal resources, we are leaving our citizens exposed to the devastating aftermath of these storms.
No, I am not a war person, so I'm very anti-war on all levels. I believe in diplomacy more than anything else. I still don't have a good understanding of why we're in Iran. And the funny thing is I don't think anybody does. And so how can we support a war if no one explains why we're in a war? What are we getting out of it? Why are we spending all of this money on an action that we don't have a clear outcome for? So that's why I'm not for the war in Iran. But I'm just very anti-war in general.
It was never a good idea for one person to be able to unilaterally just make up tariffs and then just arbitrarily do it. Like, it's not a power that he possesses. That should have gone through Congress. Everyone said, "Oh no, let him cook and give him time and stuff." And then finally when we started getting the numbers back, everything showed that it didn't work across the board. Then they found it was unconstitutional, and then they started doing refunds and stuff like that. But the problem with refunds is they were refunding the companies. But the companies passed all of those costs down to the consumers. The person that actually paid the tariffs was us. It was a nightmare scenario to begin with because it was not thought out, and then when it was found unconstitutional, then it had no plan of attack to actually get it back to the people that actually paid those tariffs. Our economy is still in trouble because we don't have a good plan starting at the top and working our way down. And if we don't have a plan going from the top and working our way down, then there's no chance of our economy actually recovering by itself.
That's the reason I actually want to be a part of Congress. I am trying to change that. Te fact that Congress gives away their power, it infuriates me on all levels ... I'm running to actually change how Congress works on a fundamental level ... The idea behind it is that I'm gonna be accountable to my people literally every single day on every single vote, because if I'm not doing something, they will immediately be able to tell me, and I will immediately have to be able to answer why I'm not doing anything. And I think that is what's needed in Congress. We need to be accountable to our people, and right now I don't think anybody is.
My example that I give is I was at the Village's Democratic meeting. I'm standing up there giving my speech and doing my slides. One of my slides says, "Who here in this room is happy with our current Democratic Party?" And out of the 200 people in that room, zero people raised their hands. In a Democratic club, zero people are happy with the Democratic Party.
I'm like, "Then why are we getting the same people up there? Why are we trying to do the same exact thing and expecting a different outcome?" And I'm like, literally, that is the definition of insanity, is doing the same thing and expecting different stuff to happen. So then I'm like, it is time for a change, and I am that change.
I went to the Swap-O-Rama Flea Market down in Webster, Florida, which is, like, the extreme edge of my district. There were so many Republicans there. And it was actually super fun talking to them because there's nothing that says Democrat on my booth at all, and so they would come talk to me, and I'd actually have a whole entire conversation. And some of them would never even ask. They would just take my card and then just walk away. And I think that was great because I want people to focus on policies more than parties anyway. So I'm just trying to be like, "This is what I'm running for, and I'm trying to fix things, and I wanna help everybody, and I wanna educate people.”
I alway side with women. I have too many sisters to do anything but that. There's been so much rhetoric around [abortion] that people think that this is a giant problem, and people are just running around having these willy-nilly. And when you talk to people, and you actually hear the stories behind why they had an abortion, it is heart-wrenching, and it is not a whim. It is a need, it is a medical need. There are problems behind it, and there are reasons. And why do people in power think that they can regulate that kind of stuff is beyond me. It has to be an individual person's choice between them and their doctor, and the medical people that actually know what's happening. And that's where it has to end. Medical things shouldn't be different from state to state to state because one person like living in, let's say Florida, should have the same medical rights as someone living in Georgia or New York or California. And because we are one united nation, it doesn't make sense that each state should have the different laws about something so personal and such a medical necessity.
Well, of course, I am for gay marriage on every level. Marriage has to be one of those inalienable rights that we have. And the only reason that people think that gay marriage shouldn't exist is, again, because of religious views almost always. And we have to remember to separate church and state. If it makes people happy, then why do you care? Does it hurt your male-female marriage for me to marry my partner? It doesn't, because that is a scarcity mindset that we can only have so many marriages or marriage is this one specific thing. And why? There is an abundance. Me being happy and living my life doesn't affect you living your life or being happy either. And anyone that tries to put limits on someone else's happiness for a reason, like a personal reason, is just being selfish at that point.
As a person, I am very anti-guns. I actually got mugged at gunpoint. It changed my perspective. I don't understand why we need guns as a society. I'm for it for hunting, and I think that's great. If you wanna hunt, 100 percent. But that is not the same type of gun as just walking around with something hanging out of the back of your pants kind of a thing. So I think that we need to have better gun laws just in general, and the open carry laws in Florida are a problem. Just across the board, I think we are too gun heavy in America.
Before we always wanted to have guns when America was formed, right? Because we wanted to make sure that no one could overthrow us. And if we wanted to, we need to make sure that we could defend ourselves, right, right? Military nowadays isn't that. We don't have that anymore, right? We're not marching in lines with a musket trying to shoot each other across the way. We're in tanks, and we're in drones, and we're doing stuff that it just doesn't make sense anymore. Like, we don't need individual guns to do this kind of stuff.
Things I would like to see are storing guns at shooting ranges because that’s where you’re mostly going to use them. I think gun safes have to be required, right in the home. There are too many school shootings and other kind of shootings where people get the guns from their family members because they're just laying about. You have to be old enough to drive the car, you have to be able to take the classes, pass the test, and prove that you can be responsible with that car, and that's just a car, right? Like, why don't we have even that as a baseline for guns?
I don't think we should supply them any military weapons that are offensive going forward right now. Defensive stuff I think we should still help them with because they are still getting attacked from other terrorist organizations. I support trying to make sure that they can defend themselves, but I don't support them attacking other countries willy-nilly.
I believe we need renewable energy on every level. So as an engineer and as a technical person in general, there are so many up-and-coming technologies that we can use and that would help us with all the other problems. Because one of the big problems is AI uses too much energy. How do we change that? We need more energy. Okay, but how do we make more energy? Right now, if we use fossil fuels, then we're just polluting even more and more, and we need to figure out a way that can solve all the different problems at once.
I really enjoy solars, for example, and there's a couple different companies here in Florida that are actually working on it. Like ExoWatt is a really good one. Um, and then they're actually doing something kind of unique, where they're actually using, like, magnifying glasses- Hmm. -that heat up clay bricks to hold the energy, and then the energy or the heat is then siphoned off in, like, a motor from two hundred years ago that just kind of is a piston motor that kind of makes the energy then. And it is wonderful, and it's super scalable, and they fit it inside of, like, a normal cargo-shaped container. And so they're easily deployable, and it's just great technology, and they're actually proving that it works now.
And the only thing is, is our government keeps blocking these kind of things at every level. And the only reason that I can come up with is it has to be, like, a lobbying issue from the fossil fuels and the oil companies, because we have been-- so much of our past has been dealing with that- Mm-hmm that it is so ingrained into our government that it's gonna be hard to get them to do anything else. And so we need people up there that aren't beholden to lobbyists and aren't beholden to actual companies and will fight for, like, what the best is for our whole entire country. And honestly, for me, that's renewable energy. It's wave, it's water, it's solar. It's anything along those lines of that.
Currently not much. Going forward, I would like to see a lot more accountability has to be on every level of government, just in general. Right now I feel like the House members aren't really responsible for anything. And then one of the things that drives me nuts is that they're exempt from FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests.
I was trying to get information for Daniel Webster, for example, about how many people were trying to call in against a bill. I called their office and I asked for that information, and they said, Oh, we don't need to provide that to you. Then I called the clerk of the House of Representatives in DC to talk to them for a while, and they're like, "Oh yeah, we can try to fill out a FOIA request, but the one branch that doesn't have to do FOIA requests is the House of Representatives of Congress." And I was like, "Why?" And they're like, "I don't really have a good reason for that."
one of the things that I wanna do is make sure that all that information is very transparent. So I've already pledged that any of that data coming in, um, usually they use a system called QI for it to kind of keep track of all the calls and all the texts and emails and stuff, and the only people that have to use that is they use it internally in their offices, but they never have to publish it. Uh, for me, I wanna publish all that data to make sure that people understand, like, how many people are actually calling in about different issues, because I think that's important. Especially when people claim they have a mandate to do something, prove it. Where is the people that are calling for this? Where are the people that really want it to happen? And if you can't prove it, then how can you claim to have a mandate? Who is giving you that mandate? So I wanna see a lot more accountability for that kind of stuff.
My other plan of attack is constant accountability for my votes. Right now people can guarantee votes to lobbyists and other companies, but it doesn't adequately represent the people. And so even if they call in, they never have to give that information out. But the Digital Democracy Project, who I'm actually partnered up with, who is a Central Florida-based company, um, they're nonpartisan and not for profit, and they're only concerned about transparency in election. They have a new thing where they have a scorecard where you can actually vote on different bills, and then it will show you with a thumbs up or a thumbs down if your representative voted with you or against you. I'll be accountable 100 percent of the time. My platform of direct democracy means I'll always vote the majority opinion, so I can't ever kind of go rogue off on my own
Has never held elected office.
Professor, Computer Technology, Full Sail University
Purdue University, B.S., Interdisciplinary Engineering/Telecommunications, 2000
