How Civic Technology Is Reimagining the Act of Voting

In many places, people want to be part of deciding the actions that influence their regular lives, whether that's voting for how to use a public budget or participating in local elections. But for many, the systems in place to make that type of engagement possible fall short, as many processes deal with heavy paperwork and physical locations, creating friction that makes participation feel inaccessible.

But Nadira Pranatio, a software engineer who's been behind data systems for major companies and local communities alike, believes a shift is underway. She sees a future where digital platforms can turn democratic participation into something intuitive and continuous, bridging the distance between people and the decisions that inform how they live their day-to-day.

Why Civic Workflows Are Out of Step with How People Live

Public institutions in many international regions still depend on manual workflows. For residents, this means tasks like submitting feedback, attending hearings, or accessing basic information often ask people to be physically present at an inconvenient location, all with heavy paperwork difficult to track down. This, in turn, makes meaningful participation far more difficult than it needs to be, especially for those without enough time to spare.

This reliance on analog infrastructure creates persistent barriers in how regular people interact with civic matters. In fact, the Knight Foundation reports that only about one in four Americans regularly takes part in local civic activities because the processes feel inaccessible, making involvement cumbersome at the very moment communities most need clarity and ease.

Nadira Pranatio believes these challenges are linked less to public indifference and more to systems that fail to match the pace of contemporary life. Growing up in Indonesia, where she taught herself to code in a location with very few digital resources, she saw firsthand how much accessibility shapes meaningful interaction. Those lessons inform her conviction that civic technology must meet people where they already are to encourage true engagement.

A Real-World Example: Nadira Pranatio's Open Democracy Platform

Years later, Pranatio was able to put those ideas to the test when she developed a civic decision-making platform that was successfully adopted by the city of Evanston, Illinois. The tool sought to give Evanston residents a direct way to decide how to allocate $3 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding and address the city's needs.

The platform was designed to support people with a wide range of digital comfort levels, with the intent of having community discussions gathered, organized, and converted into actionable proposals. Residents who'd never attended in-person meetings could join in from home and pitch in their votes. Organizers could capture input quickly and synthesize it in real-time, making time-consuming administrative tasks easier to handle and manage.

Pranatio ultimately achieved a nation-leading turnout with over 6,500 participants. By making participation simple and intuitive, the system ensured anyone could understand it and pulled new voices into civic conversations. "It was important to show democratic processes could be redesigned, not replaced, with technology," she says. "When the barriers are low, and the tools feel accessible, people are far more willing to participate in their communities."

An Ongoing, International Shift to Digital Democracy

That local experiment, Pranatio realizes, was one indicator of a larger trend to modernize how institutions engage their residents. Countries like Estonia have expanded nationwide digital voting pilots, allowing citizens to cast legally binding ballots online, and cities like Madrid have introduced platforms like Decide Madrid that let residents propose and vote on public projects, drawing hundreds of thousands into processes once limited to small committees.

Pranatio believes these kinds of initiatives are promising because they have the potential to turn civic involvement into something that can, over time, become a regular part of people's lives. When participation becomes simpler, she says, more voices begin to surface, especially from communities historically left out of formal processes.

But she also warns that the expansion of these tools requires paying careful attention to their internal security measures. If these platforms fail to properly communicate how information is collected and used, people may be wary of how comfortable they might feel using them. And without proper cybersecurity reinforcements, digital tools intended to strengthen civic life could find themselves vulnerable to exploitation or manipulation.

She also points out that the way these tools are built must reflect the way people naturally interact with everyday apps. Pranatio advocates for systems with interfaces that make their inner workings easy to follow.

"The more accessible civic technology becomes, the stronger democracy gets," she says. "But accessibility only matters if people can trust the systems they're being invited to use."

Technology as a Public Good

Looking ahead, Nadira Pranatio imagines a world where interacting with public institutions online is as familiar as checking a bank balance or confirming an appointment. In this future, communities would actively contribute to civic decisions on an ongoing basis rather than in isolated moments, guided by tools that provide complex information in a clear manner.

She sees this shift as a natural progression of what's already happening, with governments and corporations alike working more directly with these new types of digital engagement.

Pranatio believes that as civic technology matures, democratic systems can become a more relevant and present aspect of people's lives. As such, her work centers on making sure that the systems people use are easy to understand and access, with the aim of empowering communities without overwhelming them. As she herself puts it, "Technology should make people feel closer to their governments, not further away."