For the past decade, election debates in the United States and some European countries have revolved around access, accountability, and security. The discussion has become deeply politicized, especially since the 2000 American election. One side pushes expanded mail-in and remote voting, whereas others push for voter-identification laws and stricter eligibility checks. In the USA, moves are being made to introduce the SAVE America Act, which would ensure identification for voting. But the voter-ID debate is solving identity, not legitimacy — and a new industry is emerging to solve the second problem. This week, I spoke to Shai Bargil, co-founder and CEO of Sequent, a company that uses cryptography and open-source software to provide secure, transparent, and end-to-end verifiable digital election results. According to Bargil, the future of election legitimacy is based on how organizations can independently verify the outcome afterward. “People are kind of losing trust in the system today,” he told me. “It’s very hard to track how elections are being conducted. Whether it’s on paper or whether it’s digital.” Founded in 2021 by Bargil alongside CTO Eduardo Robles and Head of Research David Ruescas, Sequent has raised $3.2 million. It works with election bodies for governments, municipalities, and public institutions such as unions and universities to ensure voter privacy, ballot secrecy, fully open-source election results, and system-wide transparency for online votes. Its ambition is to do for e-voting what online banking did for finance: make it accessible, secure, and auditable. Remote Voting Turned Elections Into A Technology Platform Tensions surrounding policy and implementation are intensifying as voting habits change. Remote participation expanded dramatically across the West through absentee ballots, mail-in voting, and overseas voting programs, especially in the United States in the 2020 election. “Thirty percent of all Americans vote in federal elections by mail,” Bargil noted, with the trend only set to increase. Once voting happens outside a polling station, elections start to resemble other online systems, and so verification and trust become central issues. “If you’re voting by mail, you basically don’t identify in any way,” he said, arguing that verification must be paired with proof of accurate counting. “We need to prove above all doubts that the winner won and the loser lost,” he added. So here lies the joint-solution: that voter ID laws answer eligibility, but cryptographic verification solutions like Sequent answer legitimacy. The Philippines Became A Real-World Test Case Last year, it helped roughly 1.2 million cast digital ballots remotely for elections in the Philippines, with the deployment functioning as a live demonstration of a model where authentication and verification are built together. Instead of trusting a vendor or election authority alone, observers can audit mathematical proof that votes were recorded and counted correctly. “You don’t really have to trust either the system or the vendor,” Bargil says. Elections Are Becoming Regulated Tech Infrastructure Historically, election legitimacy came from process visibility: observers watching ballot boxes, physical counting, and human oversight. Digital systems can break that psychological assurance since citizens cannot “see” software and how it is gathering and counting votes, or if the vote was counted at all. The solution, Bargil argued, is about replacing visual trust with mathematical certainty. “Criticism comes because most of the systems today are pretty much black boxes.” This shifts the questions surrounding election integrity into the faith in the technology itself. The goal isn’t to prevent fraud alone, but to reduce unverifiable outcomes - a concern often raised by critics of large-scale remote voting. The Next Political Fight May Be Technical These new American voter-ID laws may therefore represent only the first layer of a new civic technology stack. Identity verification will confirm who participates (like in most other countries), and Sequent’s cryptographic verification technology can confirm what actually happened. “My biggest concern… people losing trust and losing interest in elections,” Bargil concluded. In the coming decade, election disputes may shift away from courtroom arguments over ballots and toward technical arguments over proof standards — similar to cybersecurity breaches or financial audits. Much like any other area, it could cause deep civil mistrust in the institutions that are designed to protect democracy. Whether this new technology can restore trust remains an open question, but the next-generation technical battleground is already forming. The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe
