Hard questions about My Vote Forward

Any plan that touches voting should be tested against the hardest questions people can ask. This page collects them. Each answer below stands on its own, says plainly what is known and what is not, and links to the chapter that covers it in depth. Where the honest answer is “this is unresolved”, the answer says so.

These are not marketing questions. They are objections. Some of them are only partly answered by the framework, and a few point to problems that no website can solve alone.

Defined terms

• Framework: the My Vote Forward model of three separate activities: setting shared priorities, optionally expressing opinions, and casting a private vote. See the framework.
• Demo: the demonstration at demo.myvoteforward.com. It uses simulated data and casts no official votes.
• Operator: whoever runs a system built on the framework. Today that is My Vote Forward for these educational websites only.
• Official vote: a vote cast in an election run by a legally responsible election authority. Nothing on these websites is one.

The objections

Who chooses the ten?

The ten starting subjects in the My Vote Forward demo (education, economy and work, health and care, housing and communities, infrastructure and transport, environment and energy, safety and justice, government and rights, immigration and citizenship, defense and foreign affairs) were chosen by the project as a provisional working list. They are a coverage experiment, not a universal map of public life, and they are stored as versioned configuration so they can change without silently rewriting anyone’s earlier answers. The objection is still a serious one: whoever writes the list shapes what people are asked about, and agenda control is a real form of power. Who should hold that power in any real deployment, how the list should be reviewed, and how people could appeal an omission are unresolved questions. The framework’s answer is to make the list visible, versioned, and contestable rather than hidden. Full discussion: Priorities and Governance.

Full answer: Who chooses the ten?

Can wealthy groups dominate?

Yes, a priority-setting system like My Vote Forward could be dominated by organized or well-funded groups if nothing prevents it. Research on United States policymaking has found that economic elites and business-oriented groups had substantial independent influence on policy outcomes while average citizens had little independent influence;⁠¹ that is one study, and its interpretation is debated, but the risk it describes is real. The framework’s design responses are partial: one account per verified participant in any future official setting, no paid placement or pay-to-rank, no candidate sponsorship, no data sale, and published methods so that coordinated participation can be detected and discussed. None of these fully prevents organized persuasion, which is also a normal part of democratic life. Where persuasion ends and domination begins is a governance question, not a technical one. Full discussion: Collective priorities and Governance.

Full answer: Can wealthy groups dominate?

Does a majority decide rights?

No. In the My Vote Forward framework, a popular priority is information about what people care about; it is not a decision about anyone’s rights. Constitutional systems often place certain rights beyond the reach of a vote. The United States Supreme Court put it directly in 1943: fundamental rights “may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections”.⁠² That principle comes from existing constitutional practice, not from this project. The framework treats minority rights as a limit on what any aggregate can mean: a ranking cannot authorize a policy, and a ballot measure is only valid within the legal powers of the jurisdiction that holds it. How a future system should flag a proposal that may conflict with protected rights, and who decides that, is unresolved. Full discussion: Representation and Jurisdictions.

Full answer: Does a majority decide rights?

Can someone be punished for an opinion?

Public voting exposed voters to pressure, and that history is part of why secret ballots exist. The Australian Electoral Commission notes that open voting left voters “vulnerable to intimidation and coercion” before the secret ballot was introduced.⁠³ The My Vote Forward framework separates opinions from votes for this reason. Sharing an opinion is voluntary and specific: a person chooses which opinion to publish and can stop future publication. A vote cannot be made public by the voter through the system at all. This reduces risk but does not remove it. Anything a person chooses to publish can be copied, and an employer, family member, or community can still react to it. The framework cannot prevent punishment for views a person has made public elsewhere. Full discussion: Opinions, Consent, and Intimidation.

Full answer: Can someone be punished for an opinion?

Does a fingerprint prove eligibility?

No. In the My Vote Forward framework, a fingerprint or face scan on a phone only unlocks a device or an authenticator, such as a passkey, that is stored on it. It does not show who is legally eligible to vote. NIST’s digital identity guidelines state that a biometric “does not constitute a secret and cannot be used as a single-factor authenticator”, and that biometrics may only be used as part of multi-factor authentication with a physical authenticator.⁠⁴ Eligibility is a separate legal question, decided by a registration authority under the law of a jurisdiction: age, citizenship, residence, and any other rule that applies. A fingerprint also does not stop someone from being pressured while they use their own finger. Full discussion: Identity and registration and Hardware.

Full answer: Does a fingerprint prove eligibility?

Can a household coerce a remote voter?

Yes, and this is one of the strongest objections to any remote voting design, including anything My Vote Forward might describe. When a person votes away from a supervised polling place, someone in the same room can watch, instruct, or take the device. Encryption does not prevent that. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommended in 2018 that internet voting not be used at the present time, and that marked ballots not be returned over the internet, until very robust guarantees of secrecy, security, and verifiability exist.⁠⁵ The framework treats coercion resistance as an unresolved requirement for any future official remote vote, not as a solved feature. Full discussion: Intimidation and Private voting.

Full answer: Can a household coerce a remote voter?

Why trust this operator?

You should not trust My Vote Forward, or any operator, on its word alone. The framework’s position is that trust should rest on evidence that does not depend on the operator’s honesty: published methods, versioned questions, a public record of corrections, and, for any future official vote, independent audits of paper or other durable records. Risk-limiting audits are one established example: they hand-check a random sample of voter-verified records and have a large chance of correcting a wrong outcome.⁠⁶ These educational websites do not run elections, so the trust they ask for today is limited: that the explanations are accurate and the sources are real. Who would independently oversee a real deployment, and how its operator could be removed, is unresolved. Full discussion: Governance and Audits and verification.

Full answer: Why trust this operator?

What if someone changes position?

Changing a position is allowed and expected in the My Vote Forward framework. A person’s priorities and opinions can be revised at any time, and a revised answer replaces the earlier one going forward rather than being treated as a contradiction. When the official wording of a proposal changes, an earlier opinion is marked stale and the person is invited to review it; it is never silently carried over to new wording. For elected representatives, the framework treats a changed position as something to explain, not something to punish automatically: new evidence and changed circumstances are legitimate reasons. One limit applies to people as well: an opinion that was published can be withdrawn from future releases, but copies already distributed cannot be recalled. Full discussion: Opinions, Representation, and Published releases.

Full answer: What if someone changes position?

What if most people never participate?

Then the results describe the people who took part, not the public. This is a central limit of any opt-in system, including My Vote Forward. People who choose to answer often differ from people who do not, and online opt-in samples carry known quality problems; Pew Research Center’s 2026 methods report on the subject is titled “No Easy Fix for Bogus Respondents in Online Opt-In Polls”.⁠⁷ The framework’s answer is disclosure, not correction by assertion: every published aggregate must state who took part, the denominator, how missing answers were handled, and that participants are not the same as constituents. Low participation also weakens any claim that a result should guide policy. Whether weighting or sampling methods could make future results representative is an open research question. Full discussion: Measurement and Representation.

Full answer: What if most people never participate?

Who funds it?

My Vote Forward publishes these educational websites. They accept no donations and sell no memberships. The framework rules out selling data, paid influence, pay-to-rank, candidate sponsorship, and campaign targeting, because any of those would give money a direct line into what the public sees. How a future operational system would be funded, and what rules would keep funders away from the agenda and the results, is unresolved. Common options in public life include government budgets, foundation grants, and member dues, and each carries its own risks of influence. The governance chapter sets out the independence requirements any funding model would have to meet, including public disclosure of funders and a ban on funder access to individual data. Full discussion: Governance and About.

Full answer: Who funds it?

Can an institution lawfully ignore a result?

Usually, yes, unless the law says otherwise. Whether a public expression of priorities or opinion binds anyone depends on the legal powers of the jurisdiction. Most consultation is advisory: a city council or legislature may hear it and decide differently. Some systems give citizens formal powers; in Switzerland, for example, a federal popular initiative to amend the Constitution requires 100,000 signatures collected within 18 months.⁠⁸ My Vote Forward priorities and opinions have no legal force of their own. The framework’s position is that an institution which departs from a clear public priority should explain why, but explanation is a norm, not a legal duty created by this project. Full discussion: Proposals, Participation between elections, and Jurisdictions.

Full answer: Can an institution lawfully ignore a result?

What happens when the network fails?

For these My Vote Forward educational websites, a network failure means a page does not load; nothing official is lost. For the demo, a failure may lose an unsaved simulated draft. For any future official vote, the question is far more serious, and the framework treats it as a requirement rather than a solved problem: voting must remain possible through other channels, a person must never be counted twice across channels, and there must be a durable record that survives a system outage. The National Academies recommended human-readable paper ballots for United States elections partly so that results can be checked independently of the software.⁠⁵ The framework does not claim a network design that meets these needs today. Full discussion: Security and Audits and verification.

Full answer: What happens when the network fails?

Who can see my data?

On the My Vote Forward demo, your account details and your saved priorities and opinions are private to you and to the limited administrative access needed to run the service. They are not shown to other visitors, not included in public statistics, and not sold. Public community priorities on the demo are simulated, not built from real accounts. An opinion becomes visible to others only if you choose to publish that specific opinion. A ballot choice can never be published through the system. Any future research release would require separate, purpose-specific consent and a privacy review, and would publish aggregates only. The full data classes, and what each permits, are set out in the privacy chapter. Full discussion: Privacy, Consent, and Published releases.

Full answer: Who can see my data?

Is this an official voting service?

No. My Vote Forward is an educational framework, and its websites are not an election authority. They do not register voters, do not issue ballots, and do not cast or count official votes. The demo at demo.myvoteforward.com uses simulated data and simulated election schedules, and nothing done there is counted anywhere. Using encryption, passkeys, or secure hosting does not make a system an approved voting system; in the United States, for example, voting systems are tested against the Election Assistance Commission’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, with adherence required in some states by their own law,⁠⁹ and this project has not been tested or certified against them. The framework’s long-term ambition includes real, authorized private voting, but that would require legal authority and independent evaluation that do not exist. Full discussion: Status and Private voting.

Full answer: Is this an official voting service?

Won’t this increase polarization?

It could, if My Vote Forward rewarded people for picking sides in public or published scoreboards of “us versus them.” Survey research shows partisan hostility in the United States rose sharply between 1994 and 2014, and cross-country research finds the United States had the largest rise in affective polarization among twelve wealthy democracies studied. The framework’s responses are design choices: it asks which subjects deserve attention separately from what should be done about them, keeps individual opinions private by default, builds no public profiles or leaderboards, and can report shared priorities as well as differences. Intensive deliberative formats have reduced polarization in experiments, but no evidence yet shows that this lighter design does. It is a hypothesis to test, and it cannot control how others frame a result.

Full answer: Won’t this increase polarization?

Won’t bots flood it?

They could flood any open online system. The New York Attorney General found that nearly 18 million of more than 22 million comments in the FCC’s 2017 net neutrality proceeding were fake, and Pew Research Center has documented insincere “bogus respondents” distorting online opt-in polls. The My Vote Forward demo uses simulated data and offers no real defense. Any real deployment would need one verified account per eligible person, published rules for detecting coordinated activity, counts of what was excluded, and results labeled by how participants were verified. Strong identity checks reduce fakes but exclude some people and create sensitive records, and no detection method catches everything.

Full answer: Won’t bots flood it?

Isn’t online voting insecure?

For official ballots, the objection is largely right. In 2018 the National Academies concluded that internet voting should not be used at the present time and that marked ballots should not be returned over the internet, and federal agencies have rated electronic ballot return high risk. My Vote Forward does not offer online official voting and does not dispute that conclusion. Its online parts are advisory priorities and opinions, which carry different and lower stakes than a ballot. Its interest in secure private voting is stated as a list of unmet requirements, including legal authority and independent evaluation, not as a finished capability.

Full answer: Isn’t online voting insecure?

Doesn’t this favor the tech-savvy?

An online-only version would. Pew Research Center’s 2026 data show near-universal internet use among United States adults but home broadband at 78% overall and 57% among adults in households earning under $30,000. Access, skill, and comfort all shape who takes part, and voluntary participation tends to overrepresent people who are already engaged. My Vote Forward’s answer is to report who participated, never to present participants as the public, to publish any weighting alongside unweighted results, and to require offline and assisted channels in any real deployment. None of those channels exists yet, and weighting cannot correct for differences that are not measured.

Full answer: Doesn’t this favor the tech-savvy?

Why not just call your representative?

Calling, writing, and meeting officials is a protected right, and My Vote Forward replaces none of it. The case for a complement rests on what officials hear: a 2018 study of 3,765 state legislators found that legislators in both parties overestimated their constituents’ support for conservative policies, and the authors suggest who contacts legislators may be part of the reason. The framework offers an aggregated signal with a stated method, a denominator, and a description of who took part, focused on which subjects deserve attention. It inherits the participation skews of any voluntary channel, and no official has yet used it.

Full answer: Why not just call your representative?

Why separate opinion from vote?

Because they do different jobs and attract different harms. In My Vote Forward, an opinion is a revisable view on a specific wording that a person may choose to share; a vote is a final choice on an official ballot that must stay secret. Open voting historically exposed voters to intimidation and vote buying, which the secret ballot was adopted to prevent. Survey research shows wording changes answers, and deliberation research shows views move with information, so an early opinion is not a commitment to a later vote. The cost of the separation is simplicity: three activities with three sharing rules are harder to explain, and whether participants understand them is untested.

Full answer: Why separate opinion from vote?

Can public priorities be manipulated by media?

Media coverage does shape which issues people consider important; agenda-setting research since 1972 supports that, and a My Vote Forward ranking would reflect it. The framework cannot separate media-shaped priorities from any other kind, because people’s sense of importance always comes partly from what they see and hear. What it can do is date every release, show results over time, let people revise rankings, keep priorities separate from positions, and flag coordinated activity under published rules. It cannot detect sophisticated influence operations, and it cannot stop a dated snapshot from being quoted as a lasting public will.

Full answer: Can public priorities be manipulated by media?

Who writes the questions?

In the My Vote Forward demo, the project writes the questions and proposals people give opinions on, and wording is real power: survey experiments show that changing the options offered can move answers by more than 20 percentage points. The framework’s answer is to publish the exact wording, version, options, order, and author of every item, keep each opinion tied to the wording it answered, and run split-wording tests where wording is contested. Independent review of the kind the UK Electoral Commission gave the Scottish independence referendum question does not exist for this project, and disclosure only helps readers who check it.

Full answer: Who writes the questions?

What about people without internet?

They would be left out of an online-only version, and they are not a rounding error: Pew Research Center’s 2026 data show that more than one in five United States adults lack home broadband, and the share is higher among lower-income households. My Vote Forward’s position is that any real deployment must include paper, phone, and in-person assisted channels counted under the same rules as online participation, and that online-only results must say so prominently. Long-running programs such as Porto Alegre’s participatory budget were built around in-person assemblies. The project has built no offline channel yet.

Full answer: What about people without internet?

Is this direct democracy?

No. Direct democracy lets voters decide laws themselves, as Swiss voters do several times a year and California voters do on qualified initiatives. My Vote Forward’s priorities and opinions are advisory: they enact nothing and override no elected body. The framework learns from direct democracy’s record, including concerns about minority rights and complex measures, without claiming its authority. The objection still has force: advisory results can be treated as mandates by officials, campaigns, or journalists, and a project with “vote” in its name invites that reading. Staying advisory also exposes the framework to the charge that consultation without power changes little.

Full answer: Is this direct democracy?

Does this replace elected officials?

No. My Vote Forward produces advisory information; elected officials keep every power they hold, including the power to disagree, and accountability stays with elections. Comparable programs, such as Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly and East Belgium’s permanent citizens’ dialogue, send recommendations to elected bodies rather than replacing them. A real pilot would state in advance what a public body commits to, such as a written response, and nothing more. The open question is behavioral: more visible public input could make representatives more accurate about what constituents care about, or could encourage them to follow rather than exercise judgment. No evidence yet shows which.

Full answer: Does this replace elected officials?

What about non-citizens and minors?

Official voting in United States federal and state elections is limited to citizens aged 18 and older, and My Vote Forward does not change or challenge that. Advisory programs have chosen differently: New York City participatory budgeting let residents 16 and older vote regardless of immigration status, and East Belgium draws citizens’ assembly members from residents 16 and older, including registered foreign residents. Whether a real deployment should include non-citizens or minors is contested on principled grounds, and the framework does not decide it for a community. Its fixed rule is that every deployment states its eligible population in advance and every result names exactly whose views it describes.

Full answer: What about non-citizens and minors?

How is this different from petitions?

A petition counts supporters of one demand written by its organizer. My Vote Forward asks participants to rank many subjects against one another and reports the full distribution, including what people ranked low, with a denominator and a published method. Individual rankings stay private, while petition signatures can be public; the United States Supreme Court has held that disclosure of referendum petitions does not generally violate the First Amendment. Some petitions also carry legal force the framework lacks, such as forcing a Swiss national vote. Rankings share petitions’ weaknesses: self-selection and organized mobilization.

Full answer: How is this different from petitions?

Can government use this data?

Any data an operator holds could, in principle, be sought through legal process, and protections vary by type of data and jurisdiction. The Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter decision required a warrant for historical cell-site records but called itself narrow, and it does not settle how political opinion data held by a civic platform would be treated. My Vote Forward’s main protection is structural: never handle official ballots, collect as little individual data as possible, keep opinions private by default, and publish only aggregates that pass privacy review. Even aggregates can leak information if poorly designed. The framework does not promise that lawful demands will never reach participant records.

Full answer: Can government use this data?

Why should anyone trust published releases?

No one should trust a My Vote Forward release on the operator’s say-so. A release earns credibility by publishing what a skeptic needs to check it: sponsor and funder, exact wording and list version, who took part and how they were verified, the counting method chosen in advance, exclusions, results with and without weighting, and limitations. That standard comes from survey disclosure codes and from election audits that put key steps in public view. Today there is no real release, no track record, and no independent auditor, and privacy limits how much underlying data can be shown, so trust has not yet been earned.

Full answer: Why should anyone trust published releases?

Evidence

The evidence behind these answers is cited where it is used. The strongest points are legal and institutional: international law treats the secret ballot as part of genuine elections,⁠¹⁰ and expert reviews of election technology have recommended paper records and audits over internet return of ballots.⁠⁵ Empirical claims about influence and participation rest on a small number of studies and are labeled as such.

Competing interpretations

Some readers will take the honest “unresolved” answers here as a reason not to pursue the framework at all. Others will see them as the normal state of a research program. Both readings are reasonable. On wealth and influence in particular, scholars disagree about how strongly the evidence shows elite domination, and this page cites one prominent study rather than a settled consensus.

Application to this framework

Each objection maps to a design limit: agenda control to versioned, reviewable subject lists; coercion to the separation of opinion and vote; identity to the separation of authentication and eligibility; funding to the prohibition on data sale and paid influence. None of these limits is a guarantee.

Unresolved questions

• Who should hold agenda authority in a real deployment, and how is it appealed?
• What funding model, if any, can sustain an operator without giving funders influence?
• Can remote voting ever resist household coercion well enough for official use?
• Can opt-in participation be made representative, or should it never claim to be?