About vote.direct
Built by someone who spent years passing federal security audits
vote.direct runs verified elections for HOAs, condos, co-ops, and churches: self-serve or fully managed, online and mailed paper in one tally, with an audit record built to survive a challenge.
What we operate
A full election operation, not a form builder
Software when you want to run it yourself, people and paper when you do not.
Self-serve elections
Free up to 25 voters, flat-rate from $4.99 to 2,000 voters. Ranked, cumulative and weighted ballots, per-unit ownership, proxies, live quorum tracking, and a template library written state by state.
Managed elections
Hand the whole election over: we build the ballot, load the roster, send the notices, answer the voters, watch quorum, close, tally, and hand back the result certificate with the audit package. From $199.
Inspector of elections
Appointed as the independent inspector in Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Texas and Arizona: the roster confirmed before ballots go out, the count overseen, the certification signed. Never in California, where Cal. Civ. Code §5110(b) bars a vendor under contract to the association.
Paper and online, one tally
Mailed ballot packets with prepaid return envelopes, or mailed access letters carrying private web credentials. Every return is entered into the same count and the same audit record as the online votes.
Ballot secrecy, two modes
Anonymous mode keeps voter identity out of results and exports. Sealed mode stores no link between voter and ballot at all: not the board, not vote.direct.
The rules of your state
Notice, quorum, proxy and ballot-secrecy rules researched for all 50 states and cited to statute, with publish gates where the law requires an inspector. They support your review; they are not legal advice.
Ballots in your voters' languages
Spanish and Chinese translations rendered beside the English ballot of record, never instead of it.
A person on the phone
A published number a person answers, free test ballots of your real election before anything goes out, and the same specialist from setup to certification.
Oday Brahem
Founder & CEO
FedRAMP High & SOC 2 Work
QA engineering experience at Collabware
Former Intelligence Reservist
Canadian Armed Forces
The story
8+ years in highly regulated enterprise software,
now applied to voting.
Oday started in tech cold-calling 40 enterprises a day to sell records-management software. Within six months at Collabware he'd booked a meeting at the Pentagon, the first BDR at the company to break into US Federal accounts.
He taught himself QA engineering with no computer-science background, built Collabware's test-automation framework, pushed code coverage to 85%, and refactored their CI/CD pipelines. Collabware's product served US Federal customers that required FedRAMP High authorization, so every feature Oday tested had to meet the strictest federal security and compliance controls.
After QA, he moved into customer success (managing millions in ARR at under 4% churn) and then sales engineering, where he responded to government RFPs and won 30% of competitive bids against Microsoft resellers and OpenText.
That background is why vote.direct has SHA-256 audit trails, row-level database security, and state-specific compliance engines instead of the usual “trust us” approach.
And the ownership is on the record: vote.direct is operated by Syft8, Inc. and is 100% owned by its founder, with no outside investors. The person who owns the company is the person who builds the software and answers the support line.
Enterprise Sales
Booked a Pentagon meeting as the first BDR to break into US Federal
QA Engineering
Built test automation, 85% coverage, FedRAMP High compliance
Customer Success
Managed millions in ARR at under 4% churn
Sales Engineering
Won 30% of competitive gov RFPs against Microsoft & OpenText
Our mission
Why we exist
HOA elections still run on paper ballots and email threads. Board votes get decided by whoever shows up. When results are challenged, there's no audit trail to settle it.
vote.direct gives any organization, from a five-seat board vote to a 2,000-voter election, practical verification options and an exportable, tamper-evident audit trail, in a workflow a board member can set up without specialist election software experience. Elections up to 25 voters are free, and boards that want the whole thing run for them hand it to us instead.
Our standard
- Material product claims state their basis and limits
- Every vote has a cryptographic audit trail
- Every verification uses enterprise-grade providers
- Every state compliance rule is cited by statute
Our values
What we believe
The principles that guide how we build
Verify, Don’t Trust.
Trust is a conclusion you reach after examining the evidence, not a starting assumption.
Security Is the Work Nobody Sees.
The engineering that protects a vote from the moment it’s cast to the moment it’s counted.
Accessible Means Affordable.
Verified voting starts at $4.99 per election. We charge for the infrastructure, never for the right to vote.
Your Vote Belongs to You.
We can detect if someone votes twice without anyone seeing how they voted, and when an election needs more than that, Sealed ballots store no link to the voter at all. Anonymous means anonymous.
Ready to modernize your elections?
Build your election free and send yourself a real test ballot. See the audit trail, compliance checks, and verification in action.