Launching SIV.org
We launched SecureInternetVoting.org around July 2020. In the last year and a half or so, we've been building, learning from election officials, and running small, controlled pilots.
We've learned a tremendous amount about Election Administrators' needs, and how we can better communicate our vision of Fast, Private, & Verifiable Elections.
Today, we are excited to relaunch as the new SIV.org!
All old links & emails will continue to work, and redirect to the new, shorter domain.
So what does this means?
1. Shorter name
Since Day 1, back when the SIV Protocol was just a few sketches on a whiteboard, we've always internally called this initiative "Secure Voting".
We have to bucket it, because our team members also work on a number of other key democracy-technology initiatives, including 1) addressing deep polarization at its root, 2) neutrally-credible, privacy-protecting online identity verification, and 3) greatly strengthening the relationships between constituents and representatives.
SIV, on the other hand, is focused specifically on the technical logistics of casting ballots securely & easily.
For domain availability reasons, when we were first ready to start sharing the SIV Protocol publicly, we snagged the name SecureInternetVoting.org. We liked it for being straight and to the point — it does what it says on the tin — but it has always been a little longer than we liked.
In the meantime, we had begun referring to SecureInternetVoting.org more and more as just SIV, pronounced like the first syllable in "civilization".
We love it because it's easy to say and remember.
It's short for "Secure Internet Voting", while also connecting with our larger vision. We believe this technology can serve as part of the foundation of healthier 21st century civilization, strengthening democratic republics here and around the world.
And so, after the last year and a half of very promising early results, we decided to double down, and invest to acquire the short 3-letter domain name SIV.org.
We love it, and hope you do it.
2. Redesigned homepage and branding
We were excited to take this opportunity to update our homepage. The old homepage was ok, but it was designed early in the CV19 pandemic, and didn't reflect the latest and greatest.
Now that we better understand what especially matters to our audience, we could refine our messaging. And we've redesigned the look & feel of the homepage around our brand values of:
Powerful, Easy, & Trustworthy
See it live
We were also excited now to show how SIV works right away, such as:
This live video right at the top showing a voter's easy experience:
And how voters can simply & easily verify their vote was counted correctly:
Check out the full new homepage yourself: siv.org
And let us know if you have any feedback. We always appreciate it.
The Future
People constantly remind us about all the current distrust and ongoing disputes over election results. SIV can't eliminate that completely, but it does offer a big shift away from backroom private counting and towards neutrally-credible, independently verifiable results.
Our Product and Engineering teams have and will continue to show up every day to make this even easier. And our Marketing and Outreach teams iterate and iterate to communicate these new verifiability powers clearly.
On that note, we want to close with this beautiful 10 second clip from a short video we were sent recently: What are "Zero-Knowledge Proofs", and what can they be used for?