Open-sourcing and decentralizing elections
Full details and methods at decentelections.com
Decent Elections LLC is a company built on a new idea for manufacturing voting machines. We don't consider governments and politicians to be our customers. Our customers are the voters, and we design our systems to meet their needs first. Every voter should be entitled to a receipt that proves how they voted in every election. But our receipts aren't just pieces of paper: they're active, digital receipts that can be used to check your vote at any time, anywhere. Was your vote deleted? Was your vote changed in a computer? Now you can know instantly.
Our technology open-sources the election process and provides never-before seen transparency. There should be no secrets in the democratic process, and everyone should be allowed to participate in oversight. Our methods ensure that validating ballots and calculating results are fast and virtually free. Recounts can be done by anyone with programming skills, and the computations can run overnight on a modest home computer- even for counties with hundreds of thousands of ballots. Our goal is to end the "just trust us" business model of legacy election companies.
We have decided to break from traditional VC fundraising in an attempt to retain as much control over the company and technology as possible. Once a company has shareholders, it is legally bound to put shareholders and profits first. We don't believe elections should be run that way. We believe ethics should always come before profits. Unfortunately, providing voting machines to even a small community is a wildly expensive undertaking. We're hoping there is enough interest in fair and transparent elections to crowdfund the first batch of machines. The campaign goal is set at half a million dollars. With manufacturing costs of a thousand dollars per machine, and a throughput of about 70 electors per machine for election day, this gives us the funding to provide machines to a county of about 30 thousand registered voters (plus transportation and logistics). Any funds we raise beyond that will be used to pay employees and contractors, rent an office space, and prepare for larger deployments. For full disclosure, we have set 5% of funds for this campaign to be set aside for GiveSendGo's operating costs.
For details about how the technology works, please visit our website
Legal disclaimer: We are not a 501(c)(3). Donations are not tax-deductible
