About & funding
Who builds this, who pays for it, and where the bias could come from.
What fwdio.org is
A civic-tech prototype built for the May 19, 2026 Oregon Primary in Multnomah County. The thesis: the 144-page official voters' pamphlet is dense enough to function as a gatekeeper. Stay-at-home voters bounce. Translating it into plain English with cited primary sources lowers the effort gap to informed voting — and that's a thing entrenched power explicitly counts on you not doing.
What fwdio.org is not
- Not a campaign tool. We never tell you who to vote for.
- Not partisan. Both sides of every measure get equal space.
- Not a substitute for oregonvotes.gov on procedural questions.
- Not selling your data. There's no signup. There's nothing to sell.
Funding
v1 is self-funded by the founder. No PAC money. No candidate or campaign funding. No advocacy-org sponsorship. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed publicly on this page before any funded work ships.
Where bias could come from
Honest answer: anywhere a human makes an editorial choice. Which measures to feature first. Which arguments to summarize. Which third-party scorecards to display alongside candidates. We try to make those choices transparently, symmetrically, and reversibly — see methodology. If you think we got it wrong, write us at hi@fwdio.org with a primary source.
Privacy
No accounts. No email collection. No personal data stored. Plausible Analytics provides cookieless, IP-anonymized traffic counts. That's it.