Built for the last mile, in public
This is one person's work, done in the open, and that is a design decision rather than a stage the project is trying to grow out of.
Matthew F Reyes
Founder
Matthew works at the intersection of data engineering, civic infrastructure, and local organizing. The Ohio statewide voter file is a difficult document — comma-delimited despite its extension, with fields that don't mean what their names suggest and eighty-eight counties' worth of divergent local practice underneath a single fixed schema. Reading it correctly took months of profiling, a written ledger of per-county deviations, and several confidently wrong answers that had to be found and corrected. All of that is published, because the hard-won part is the understanding, and gating understanding is how a public record ends up private in everything but name.
He founded the Doorstep Democracy Benefit Company after concluding that the constraint on local civic engagement isn't public apathy but the friction we impose on our own volunteers — and that a county party has no standing to ask for the keys to a government until it can demonstrate it can run itself competently.
Why one person is the right size for now
Capability held inside an institution by people who can be named beats capability rented from a vendor whose business depends on you never developing it. That argument doesn't work if we become the vendor. So the commitment is the opposite of scale for its own sake: the code stays public, the method stays published, and the goal is county parties that don't need us — not an account list that can't leave.
Working in the open
The build happens in public: schema findings, the things that broke, the corrections. Some of it is genuinely useful to other people trying to read a state voter file, and all of it is a standing invitation to check the work. If you want to follow along or fund it, that's here. If you want to fork it and never speak to us again, that's here.