Founder
Oday Brahem
Founder and CEO, vote.direct. Vancouver, British Columbia.
Oday Brahem is the founder of vote.direct, an online voting platform built for the elections that get contested: HOA and condo board seats, recalls, special assessments and CC&R amendments. A community association election is only worth as much as its ability to survive the losing side asking how the result was reached, so the product is built backwards from that moment.
In practice that means verified voter identity, the statutory rules of each state encoded rather than left to the board, paper and online ballots landing in one record, and a tamper-evident audit trail an inspector of elections can read without taking anyone at their word.
He spent eight years in regulated enterprise software before this, most of it around records, compliance and government customers. That is the whole reason vote.direct looks the way it does.
Background
2017
Business development, VersaFile
An IBM robotic-process-automation partner at the time. First exposure to enterprise document and records software, selling into organizations that keep records because a regulator says they must.
2018
Collabware
Researched the US Navy and Marine Corps records systems and walked the company into the Pentagon with the SharePoint-based proposal it went on to ship. First person at the company to open US federal accounts.
2019
Lead QA engineer
Moved into engineering with no computer-science background. Two and a half years across cloud and on-prem, building the test-automation framework to 85% code coverage and refactoring the CI/CD pipelines. The product served US federal customers operating under FedRAMP High controls, so every feature was tested against them.
2021
Customer success, then sales engineering
Ran the on-prem-to-cloud migration program and brought churn down to 4%, then moved to sales engineering: government RFP responses, demo environments, and roughly 30% of competitive bids won against Microsoft resellers and OpenText. Alongside it, served as an intelligence operator in the Canadian Armed Forces reserves, working OSINT and geospatial, through 2023.
2025
VersaFile, second tour
By then an SAP middleware product company. Built the partner enablement program for an OEM rollout and led customer migrations onto SAP S/4HANA.
2026
vote.direct, full time
Around 6,000 commits in a year across vote.direct and four other projects, solo. The first year shipped the 50-state rule engine, sealed ballots, the mailed-ballot pipeline, managed elections and the inspector-of-elections service.
The work at vote.direct
The product sells a simple promise: an election that survives a challenge. These are the systems behind it, all shipped and running.
- A verification ladder
- From roster control and email or SMS codes to assisted government-ID checks with a liveness step, each level recorded against the ballot it verified.
- The rules of all 50 states, cited
- Notice, quorum, proxy and ballot-secrecy rules researched state by state and cited to statute, with publish gates where the law requires an inspector of elections. Research support, not legal advice.
- Sealed ballots
- A storage design with no link between voter and ballot for statutes that demand permanent separation. Nobody can tie a sealed ballot to a member: not the board, not vote.direct.
- A mailed-ballot pipeline
- Printed packets with prepaid return envelopes, mailed access letters carrying web credentials, and every return entered into the same tally and audit record as the online votes.
- Inspector-of-elections service
- vote.direct serves as the independent inspector in Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Texas and Arizona, and declines the role in California, where Cal. Civ. Code §5110(b) bars a vendor under contract to the association.
- Managed elections
- Elections run end to end for the board: ballot build, roster, notices, voter support, quorum watch, close, tally, and the signed result certificate with its audit package.
- Multilingual ballots
- Spanish and Chinese translations rendered beside the English ballot of record, never instead of it.
- An answer surface for AI assistants
- A public MCP server and llms.txt that let AI assistants query live pricing, state rules and the verbatim review record, so what they say about the product is what the product actually charges and does.
For press
Writing about association governance, election technology or founders in Vancouver? Everything you need is on this page. Email [email protected] and he will answer himself. Please do not run a generated biography: the approved one is below and it is free to copy.
Approved short biography
Oday Brahem is the founder of vote.direct, an online voting platform for HOA, condo and cooperative elections. Based in Vancouver, he spent eight years in regulated enterprise software as a QA engineer, customer success lead and sales engineer at Collabware and VersaFile, and served as an intelligence operator in the Canadian Armed Forces reserves. He now builds the verification, state-by-state rule engine and audit record that association elections need to survive a challenge.
Available for comment on
- How HOA and condo board elections actually get challenged, and what makes a result defensible
- State-by-state election law for community associations, including the 2024-2026 wave of statute changes
- Voter identity and verification: what email, SMS and government-ID checks each prove
- Running elections for co-ops, unions, churches and nonprofits on the same infrastructure
- Paper ballots and online ballots in one record, and why mail is not going away
- Serving as inspector of elections, and the states where the law bars a vendor from the role
- Making a product legible to AI assistants: publishing an MCP server and llms.txt instead of hoping
Assets
- Headshot (JPG, free to use with credit)
- Company background: about vote.direct
- Pricing, verbatim and current: vote.direct/pricing
