Privacy Policy

In short: vote.direct is operated by Syft8, Inc. One company, founder-run, reachable by email.

vote.direct is operated by Syft8, Inc. ("Syft8," "we," "our," or "us"), a Delaware corporation. Syft8, Inc. also operates Governance Center, the resident portal some communities use alongside their elections. This policy covers both.

The company is founder-owned and founder-run. There is no data team mining your information. There is one person building a voting product, and this page describes what that product does with data. Questions go to [email protected] and a person answers them.

In short: Organizers bring the voter roster. We process it to run their election and for nothing else.

Two kinds of people use vote.direct. An organizer (an HOA, condo or co-op board, club, congregation, or other membership group) creates an account and runs elections. A voter receives a ballot in one of those elections.

If you are a voter, the organization running your election gave us your name and contact details, decided what the election asks, and chose its privacy and verification settings. We process that roster on the organization's behalf to run its election. The organizer controls the roster, so if you believe you are on one by mistake, start with your organization. If you cannot reach them, email us and we will help.

If you are an organizer, you are responsible for having the right to give us your voters' contact details. The Terms of Service cover this.

In short: What you type, what your organization uploads about you, and basic technical records.

Information you provide:

• Account: name, email address, password, and organization details.
• Election content: questions, candidate names, documents, and messages you write as an organizer.
• Portal content: announcements, discussion posts, RSVPs, and photos posted to a community portal.
• Verification data: the email address or phone number a verification code is sent to. For government ID checks, you photograph your ID directly with our identity-verification provider. We receive the result and the extracted details (name, date of birth, document type and expiration), never the document images. The images stay with that provider under its retention terms.
• Payment: card details go directly to our payment processor in its hosted checkout. We receive confirmation of payment, the card brand, and the last four digits, never the card number.
• Support: what you send when you call, text, or email us.

Information your organization provides about you (voters):

• Roster details: your name, email address, phone number, unit or lot, vote weight, and, when your election includes mailed ballots or letters, your mailing address.

Information collected automatically:

• Sign-in and session records.
• IP address on security-relevant actions, such as requesting a verification code or opening a ballot, kept for fraud prevention.
• Browser type and pages visited. For signup analytics we record the country a request came from rather than the full IP address.

In short: To run elections, bill for them, and keep them honest. Voters never receive marketing.

• To run and deliver elections with the settings the organizer chose
• To verify voter identity at the level the organizer chose
• To send election emails, text messages, and mailed ballots or letters
• To bill organizers and keep required billing records
• To prevent fraud and abuse, including rate limiting
• To answer support requests
• To fix defects and improve the product
• To comply with legal obligations

Organizers and account holders may receive product emails from us; each one has a working unsubscribe link. Voters receive election messages only. We never use a voter roster for marketing.

In short: The organizer picks the mode before voting opens. The mode decides who can ever see your ballot.

vote.direct has three ballot privacy modes. The organizer chooses one before publishing, and the choice locks when the vote goes live.

Identified mode lets the organizer see each voter's individual ballot as well as the totals. Organizations use it when their rules require a record of how each member voted, such as some written consents.

vote.direct offers two anonymous modes.

Anonymous mode withholds the voter-to-ballot link from the vote creator, published results, per-ballot administration views, and exports. We retain the link in restricted application storage to support features such as vote changes, proxy handling, recounts by roster, and abuse investigation. Anonymous mode is an access and disclosure control; the link exists but is never shown to the organizer.

Sealed ballot mode (permanent separation) stores the ballot with no reference to the voter at all. Your voter record notes only that you voted; the ballot carries no name or identifier and only the day it was cast; your confirmation code is shown to you once on screen and is never sent by email or text, so it is never stored beside your address or phone number; and the audit trail records who voted, never which ballot. When voting closes the ballot box is re-materialised in random order so row order cannot be read as the sequence in which members voted. No one, not the organizer and not vote.direct, can tie a sealed ballot to a member, and no one sees a tally before the box opens at close. Vote changes are unavailable in this mode. Sealed ballots are built for statutes that require the voting system to permanently separate identifying information from the electronic ballot, such as California Civil Code §5110(c)(4)(B)(iv) and Florida Statutes §718.128(2)(d) and §720.317(1)(b)4.

In short: Verification codes and election notifications only. Reply STOP any time. Numbers are never shared for marketing.

When you provide your phone number, we may send you text messages containing one-time verification codes and vote notifications from vote administrators for elections you are eligible to vote in. Message frequency varies: you receive a message when you request a verification code, or when a vote administrator sends a notification for your election. Message and data rates may apply. Reply HELP for help, or STOP to unsubscribe at any time.

All SMS messages are transactional; we never send marketing or promotional text messages. We do not sell, rent, or share mobile phone numbers, or any SMS opt-in or consent information, with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Mobile information collected for text messaging is used solely to deliver verification codes and election notifications. See the SMS Messaging Terms for full details.

In short: Your organizer sees what its election settings allow. Vendors see what their job requires. Nobody buys your data.

We never sell personal information. We do not share it with data brokers or advertising networks, and we do not run ads on our site.

With your organization. Organizers see participation and verification status for their own elections, and results according to the election's settings. Your individual ballot is visible to the organizer only in identified mode; see Section 5.

With service providers, by role. Each provider processes data only to supply its service to us:

• Cloud hosting, database, and authentication
• Payment processing and government ID verification
• Text message delivery
• Email delivery
• Printing and mailing, when your election includes mailed ballots or letters (recipient names and mailing addresses)
• Product analytics and error tracking
• AI model providers, for the two features in Section 8

This list describes each provider's role rather than naming vendors. Organizations that need the named sub-processor list for a security review can request it with our Data Processing Agreement.

Support access. vote.direct is founder-operated. When you ask for help, or hire us to administer a managed election, the founder can access your election data to do that work. Access is for the work you asked for, nothing else.

Legal requirements. We disclose data when a law, subpoena, or court order requires it, or to protect the platform and its users. We will tell the affected account holder unless the law forbids it.

Business transfers. If Syft8, Inc. is ever acquired or merged, data collected under this policy remains subject to it, and we will notify account holders before their data is handled under a different policy.

In short: AI translates ballot text and answers organizer texts. Ballots you cast never go to an AI model.

Two features use AI language models: machine translation of ballot content into a voter's language, and the text-message concierge that helps organizers set up simple votes over SMS.

For translation, the ballot text the organizer wrote is sent to an AI model provider and the translation comes back. For the concierge, the messages you text to our number are processed by an AI model to compose the reply.

The choices on a ballot you cast are never sent to an AI model, and we do not use your data to train AI models.

In short: Cookies keep you signed in. Analytics counts page views without recording you. There are no advertising tags or advertising cookies.

We use sign-in and session cookies for authentication and security, and a cookie that remembers which version of a marketing page you were shown so we can compare page designs. There are no advertising tags or advertising cookies on our site. You can control cookies in your browser settings; blocking the sign-in cookie will prevent sign-in from working.

Our analytics measures page visits and the product events we explicitly chose to count. It does not use cookies; it stores a random identifier in your browser. Automatic interaction capture and session replay are disabled, and if your browser sends the Do Not Track (DNT) signal we do not load our analytics at all.

When the product breaks, an automated error report (the error, the page, and browser details) goes to our error-tracking service so we can fix it.

In short: Election records last as long as the organizer needs them and the law requires. You can ask us to erase your personal data.

Verification codes expire on their own within 30 minutes of issuance.

Election records exist to survive a challenge, and organizers often have a legal duty to keep them; some states require associations to keep election materials for a year or more. While an organizer keeps an election, its records stay.

Deleting your account deactivates it. For permanent erasure, email [email protected]. A person verifies the request and purges your personal data, except what we are required to keep, such as billing records under tax law and election records the organizer has a duty to retain. We keep a minimal record that an erasure happened.

A sealed ballot cannot be traced back to you by anyone, including us, so erasing your personal data leaves the anonymous ballot itself in the election's counted results.

In short: Encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, and an append-only audit trail. No one can promise perfect security, so we do not.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Database access is controlled row by row. Election activity is written to an append-only audit trail that is re-verified nightly. The Security page describes these measures in detail.

No online service can promise perfect security, and we do not. If a breach affects your personal data, we will notify affected account holders and organizers promptly, subject to lawful delays requested by law enforcement.

In short: Ask and we act: access, correction, export, deletion. No fee, and no penalty for asking.

You can ask us to:

• Show you the personal data we hold about you
• Correct inaccurate data
• Export your data in a machine-readable format
• Delete your data (see Section 10 for what must be kept)
• Stop or restrict certain processing, or withdraw consent
• Opt out of the sale of personal information (we do not sell it)

We honor these requests for everyone, not only where a privacy statute requires it. Email [email protected]; we will confirm it is you, then act. If your request concerns a roster your organization controls, we will route it to the organizer and help you follow up. We never penalize anyone for exercising a privacy right.

In short: vote.direct is not for children.

Our services are not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe a child's data has reached us, email [email protected] and we will delete it.

In short: The United States.

Our servers are in the United States, and your data is processed and stored there. If you use vote.direct from outside the US, you are sending your data to the US. Organizations that need a Data Processing Agreement, including Standard Contractual Clauses for international transfers, can request one.

In short: Updates are posted here with a new date. Material changes are emailed to account holders.

When our practices change, we update this page and the date at the top. If a change is material, we will email account holders.

In short: [email protected] for this policy. [email protected] for the DPA. The founder reads both.

Syft8, Inc. operates vote.direct. For anything in this policy, email [email protected]. For a Data Processing Agreement, email [email protected]. Either way, the person who answers is the founder.