Project Overseer
An open civic platform · Distributed Direct Democracy

Government you can verify.

We are building the civic operating system for a modern republic — where every valid vote can be independently trusted, participation is a dial each citizen controls, expertise informs decisions, and everyone exercising public authority is continuously accountable.

See how it works Join the work

Our first vertical slice: Proposal → Vote → Consensus → Verifiable receipt.

1 vote → 1 receipt
Every valid vote produces a cryptographic receipt its citizen can independently verify — while the ballot itself stays sealed.
0 blind trust
The public can trust the tally without trusting any single administrator, database operator, or piece of infrastructure.
10 civic domains
One versioned API — from auth to audit — serving web, mobile, and every future client of the platform.
Why we build

A republic is a promise: that public power answers to the people it serves. Somewhere between elections, the promise goes quiet.

Watch what happens after the polls close. A citizen casts a vote and receives nothing she can hold — no proof it was counted, no way to check the tally, only the assurance of institutions she is asked to trust on faith. Then, for years at a time, decisions are made in her name: budgets, wars, commitments that will outlive her — by people whose reasoning she cannot see, under authority she cannot trace, with results no one is obliged to measure against what was promised.

This is not the failure of any one party or any one person. It is the machinery itself: built for a world of paper and distance, where accountability was a report published years too late, where participation meant surrendering broad authority between elections, and where the validity of the count rested on nothing a citizen could verify for herself.

We refuse to accept that this is the best a self-governing people can do. The same decades that strained the old machinery also produced the tools to rebuild it: consensus systems that cannot silently rewrite history, cryptography that can prove a vote was counted without revealing it, and digital platforms that put a government's services in a citizen's pocket instead of a waiting line.

Project Overseer is our answer: not to discard the republic, but to give it the infrastructure its own promise has always required — votes that can be trusted, participation each citizen controls, and power that never stops answering to its source.

The founding idea

Not voting online. A civic operating system.

Project Overseer began with a research question: how could the United States preserve the republic while giving citizens much more direct, verifiable, and accountable control over government?

Our answer is not merely to put voting on the internet. It is to build infrastructure in which votes can be independently trusted, representatives are accountable to clearly defined responsibilities, citizens choose how directly they participate, and government services are delivered with the simplicity of a modern digital platform.

Four goals anchor everything we do: maintain the republic; make the validity of votes unquestionable; give stakeholders a meaningful voice with representatives accountable to their positions; and pair the voting system with automated accountability and governance administration.

Distributed Direct Democracy

Participation is a dial, not a switch.

Direct democratic authority belongs to the citizenry — but not every citizen wants to vote on every issue. On our platform, a citizen can:

  • Vote directly on selected national, state, or local questions
  • Participate directly in areas they understand or care deeply about
  • Delegate categories of decisions to trusted representatives or experts
  • Revoke or change those delegations at any time
  • Reclaim direct participation whenever desired

Delegation is explicit, limited where appropriate, and revocable — never an all-or-nothing surrender of participation between elections.

Guiding principles

Ten commitments we build around.

Maintain the republic

Strengthen legitimate constitutional government rather than casually discard institutional safeguards.

Direct democratic authority

Democratic authority originates with citizens, exercised directly or deliberately delegated.

Configurable delegation

Explicit, understandable, limited where appropriate, and revocable.

Verifiable outcomes

Votes and major civic actions should be independently auditable.

Privacy

Verifiability must coexist with ballot secrecy and protection of citizen identity.

Expertise

Complex public systems deserve genuine subject-matter expertise — without displacing democratic authority.

Accountability

Authority must be traceable to decisions, responsibilities, delegations, and outcomes.

Transparency

Public institutions should be understandable and inspectable by the people they serve.

Simplicity

Interacting with government should feel like a well-designed application, not a maze of bureaucracy.

Open, neutral infrastructure

Open to inspection and independent verification. The platform enables democratic decisions; it does not encode one faction's answers.

Extreme accountability

Part of the operating system, not a report years later.

Representatives and public institutions should not be elected and then disappear into opaque administrative systems. We are building an accountability layer where decisions, authority, commitments, conflicts, and outcomes are visible and auditable — continuously.

Expert-informed governance

Institutions responsible for complex domains should include people who understand those domains — technologists on technical infrastructure, economists on monetary systems, legal experts on constitutional questions. Experts don't replace citizens: expertise informs decisions or receives delegated authority, while the democratic source of that authority remains the citizenry.

01Who made a decision, and what authority permitted it
02Whether authority was directly exercised or delegated
03How representatives voted
04What promises or mandates preceded the decision
05Which constituencies were affected
06Relevant conflicts and disclosures
07The measurable result of the policy
08Consistency with the government's mission and constituents' wishes
Verifiable voting

Auditability must not destroy privacy.

Our first non-negotiable technical principle: a vote should be trustworthy. An eligible citizen casts a valid vote; the system demonstrates it was accepted; duplicates are prevented; the tally can be audited; events can be independently verified; and the public can trust the result without trusting a single administrator or database operator.

A public ledger must never become a public list of citizens and their plaintext ballots. That means cryptographic receipts, identity separation, privacy-preserving verification, and careful threat modeling — not simply writing ballots to a blockchain.

Consensus research — Hedera Hashgraph

Asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance, fair ordering, high throughput, low latency, trusted timestamps, DoS resistance, and multi-sector governance make Hashgraph our leading consensus candidate. But consensus is replaceable infrastructure behind a boundary — used for receipts, audit events, and attestations, never as the application itself.

Digital government reference — Diia

Ukraine's Diia platform demonstrates the other half of our mission: government should be simple. Digital identity and documents, services in a single app, mobile-first interaction, open-source development — our product reference for putting government in a citizen's pocket, not a direct copy.

Architecture

One API. Every client. Consensus behind a boundary.

FastAPI is our public platform boundary. Web and mobile use the same versioned API. Clients never talk directly to PostgreSQL or Hedera. Business rules live on the server.

Vue Web + Flutter Mobile + future clients
  └──▶ FastAPI /api/v1
       └──▶ Domain / Application Services
            ├──▶ PostgreSQL (application persistence)
            └──▶ Consensus Interface ──▶ Local provider · Hedera (planned)

Backend

Python 3.13+
FastAPI · Pydantic v2
SQLAlchemy 2 · Alembic
PostgreSQL · asyncpg
uv · pytest · Ruff

Web

Vue 3 · TypeScript
Vite · Vue Router
Pinia

Mobile

Flutter · Dart
Same versioned API

Contract

OpenAPI canonical
Generated TS + Dart
clients (planned)

/api/v1/auth/api/v1/citizens/api/v1/jurisdictions/api/v1/representatives/api/v1/proposals/api/v1/elections/api/v1/votes/api/v1/delegations/api/v1/accountability/api/v1/audit
Scope, honestly

What Project Overseer is not.

  • Not a cryptocurrency project
  • Not simply a blockchain voting application
  • Not a replacement of democratic legitimacy with algorithms
  • Not a system where experts rule without public consent
  • Not a platform whose political outcomes are predetermined
  • Not a claim that constitutional institutions can be replaced without legal and democratic processes
Politically neutral by design

Infrastructure for choices, not answers.

The platform becomes substantially more useful if citizens with very different political philosophies can use the same infrastructure. Our role is to make legitimate public choices transparent, directly participatory, secure, and accountable — not to predetermine those choices.

Exploratory topics like Universal Basic Income, a sovereign wealth fund, or tax-administration reform are possible decisions made through the infrastructure — never hard-coded goals of it.

Honest engineering

The open questions define the work.

We publish our research agenda because it is the work. These are the questions that must be answered before anything resembling real public elections should be attempted.

  • Secure citizen identity without unnecessary surveillance
  • Voter eligibility and jurisdiction modeling
  • Ballot secrecy with end-to-end verification
  • Coercion resistance
  • Receipt design
  • Recounts and dispute resolution
  • Key recovery and lost-device scenarios
  • Accessibility
  • Direct-participation and delegation semantics
  • Representative qualification and expert selection
  • Transparent conflict-of-interest disclosure
  • Constitutional constraints; local, state, federal differences
  • Auditability of administrators
  • Protection against compromised client devices
  • Denial-of-service resistance
  • Open-source governance
  • Migration between consensus technologies
  • Preventing infrastructure from becoming a new concentration of power
North Star
Build a system in which democratic authority is distributed directly to citizens, citizens can exercise or delegate that authority as they choose, every valid vote can be trusted, and everyone exercising public authority can be continuously held accountable.
Collaborate

We're building the first vertical slice now.

Project Overseer is seeking collaborators across verifiable-voting cryptography, distributed consensus, civic technology, constitutional and election law, and digital public services — and conversations with researchers, builders, and institutions who want to pressure-test the design. If the open questions above look like your questions, we want to hear from you.

Join the work

ant@theixo.com