Public institutions have clearly been taking notes from Silicon Valley. Government websites now greet you with login screens that feel lifted from social media. Civic portals track engagement like a startup obsessing over daily active users. City services ping your phone...
I started noticing it when a neighbor’s unemployment claim was flagged for fraud—not because she’d done anything wrong, but because an automated system saw a mismatch between her address and her employer’s zip code. She spent weeks on hold, sent faxes...
I’ve spent a long time watching social structures get tested. And I’ve seen, over and over, how community groups, advocacy networks, and mutual-aid organizations wrestle with tools that were never really meant for them. They lean on borrowed corporate platforms, mismatched...
When we say technology works, we usually mean it fits. It handles a problem without handing us a new one, feels like second nature instead of an intrusion, and doesn’t treat people like afterthoughts. But the way most digital tools get...
Most of us live inside systems we never agreed to. The software that structures our workday, the platforms mediating our friendships, the public databases that decide who gets a loan or a visa—these things shape life more intimately than many laws....
Elections aren’t just about counting votes. They’re about belief. When someone fills in a bubble or presses a button, they have to trust the process is straight, the tally is right, and the outcome says what the people meant. That trust...
In the quiet stretch before an election, the tools we use to make sense of the world fade into the background. We scroll. We search. We watch. And somewhere in that stream, we decide what to believe—or what to doubt. I’ve...
Back when I first started working in elections, paper was the thing that kept me up at night—ballot design quirks, signature mismatches, the chain of custody forms that piled up in county storage rooms. The digital side was thin, mostly vote...
I’ve spent years examining the machinery of democracy, often from behind a screen that glows with promises of efficiency and connection. The central question I keep returning to is not whether digital tools are good or bad for elections—that framing is...
I spend a lot of time thinking about the architecture of participation. That phrase comes from my years at Facebook, where I worked on civic engagement products, and it’s become my shorthand for how the design of a digital tool shapes...
I’ve spent years watching how technology interacts with the basic act of casting a vote. A well-designed digital tool can make an election feel more accessible, more transparent, more ours. But a poorly implemented one—or one deployed with bad intent—does the...
I don’t trust technology. I trust people. I’ve been an election official long enough to watch digital tools reshape how voters and the system interact—sometimes for the better, sometimes in ways that make me catch my breath. Some tools earn trust....