Continuous
Not once every four years
Questions arrive as they actually arise — a rezoning, a transit cut, a federal bill. You answer the ones you're entitled to answer, when they matter, not years later.
Ballotsrecordedto date
UpdatedcontinuouslyPublic
What Represent is for
Governing yourself, not being governed at.
A country is supposed to be its people. In practice most of us get to express that once, briefly, and then watch. Represent exists to close that gap — to make participation continuous, local, and worth something.
What asking costs today
Calgary asked its residents one question. It took two and a half years.
In 2018 the city put a single yes-or-no question to Calgarians: should we bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics? It is the clearest picture there is of what direct democracy costs when it has to be built from scratch every time.
$2.2M
to run the vote
The plebiscite itself, on 13 November 2018 — about $2 million of it from the province.
$17.7M
on the process around it
Total government spending on the bid exploration that the question was attached to.
29 mo
from committee to answer
June 2016, when the exploration committee began, to 19 November 2018, when it concluded.
29 months, one question
Jun 2016 · committee begins
13 Nov 2018 · the vote
19 Nov 2018 · concluded
Then it was taken apart.
That's the part that should bother you. None of it was infrastructure. The apparatus was assembled to ask one question and dismantled once it was answered, so the next question starts from zero and costs the same again.
Which is why cities almost never ask. Not because they don't want to know — because at that price you get one question every decade, and you had better be certain it's the right one.
Represent is the standing version.
The verification, the region-gating, the ledger and the count are already built and already running. Asking the hundredth question costs essentially the same as asking the first, and the answer arrives as people vote rather than two years later.
That is the actual unlock. Not a cheaper plebiscite — a world where the questions that never got asked, because nobody could justify the cost, finally get asked at all.
To be clear about what this is
A municipal plebiscite is a legally recognised vote of the electors, open to every eligible resident whether or not they own a phone. Represent is not that and does not replace it. It is the instrument for the hundreds of questions that will never justify a plebiscite — which is nearly all of them.
Figures from CBC News and the City of Calgary. Result: 171,750 against (56.4%), 132,832 in favour (43.6%). Source
Why it counts
The reason this isn't just another petition.
Everything above only works if the number at the end is real — and worth nothing if it costs you your privacy. Four things settle both.
01
Every voter is a verified person
A government ID and a liveness check, once, through a certified provider. Represent never stores your documents. Nobody votes twice, because nobody can verify twice.
02
Every vote is from where it counts
Your region comes from your ID, not a dropdown. A Calgary question is answered by Calgarians — not by bots, tourists, or whoever a link got shared to. That's the difference between noise and a mandate.
03
Your ballot is still secret
Your ID proves you're entitled to one ballot; it is never attached to the ballot itself. Nobody — your employer, your union, your city, or us — can be told how you voted.
04
The count is on a public record
Every ballot is written to a public ledger as well as our database, so the count can be checked rather than taken on trust. The ledger is running in pilot phase.
Ballot · anonymous ballots arriving
Should the city extend weekend transit to 1 a.m.?
0 verified people · 0 names attached
Each dot is one verified person. Which dot is you is not recorded anywhere.
A count you can hand to someone.
This is what a Represent result looks like when it publishes: a plain number of verified people, a split, and an entry on a record anyone can go and check for themselves.
It isn't a projection, a sample or a margin of error. It's a count of people who each proved they were one person and then answered the question.
The ballot above is an illustration, not a live vote.
For organizations
The same idea, inside your union or your board.
Members get a real say between AGMs, and leadership gets an answer with a name on it — every ballot a verified member, counted once, results the moment voting closes.
Free
$0
per month
Up to 25 members
Pro
$59
per month
Up to 250 members
Plus
$179
per month
Up to 1,000 members
Business
$499
per month
Up to 5,000 members
01 — Identity
Every voter is a verified human.
Before you can vote, you verify once: a government-issued ID and a liveness check — a short selfie capture that defeats a photo of a photo — handled by a certified identity provider.
Represent never stores your documents. The images stay inside the provider's infrastructure. What we keep is the decision — verified or not, and the region — attached to a one-way hash. Our database holds no passport images to leak, because we never receive them.
Verification is free to you. We treat the cost as ours to carry.
02 — The region
Every vote is from where it counts.
Your region comes from your ID, not a dropdown. A Calgary question is answered by Calgarians — not by bots, tourists, or whoever a link got shared to. That's the difference between noise and a mandate.
Verifying a person is only half the problem. An online poll can be full of real human beings and still tell you nothing about a neighbourhood, because there is no way to know which of them live there. Represent gates every ballot on the region read off your verified document, so eligibility is a fact rather than a claim.
A municipal question reaches only residents of that municipality. A provincial one reaches the province. You can't opt into a region you don't live in, and you can't be recruited into one by a link.
That's what lets a council read a Represent count as their own constituents rather than the internet's opinion of them.
03 — The secret ballot
We know you're real. We don't know how you voted.
Verifying who you are and recording what you chose are two separate things, and Represent deliberately never joins them. Your identity proves you're entitled to one ballot. It is not attached to the ballot you cast.
When you vote, the system checks off that your entitlement for that question is spent — so you can't vote twice — and files your choice separately, with no link back to your name, your ID or your account. The secret ballot is the oldest safeguard in democracy, and being verified doesn't cost you it.
Which means nobody — not your employer, not your union, not your city, not us — can be told how you voted. There is no query that returns it, because the association was never stored.
04 — The record
Checkable by someone who doesn't trust us.
Every ballot is written twice: to our database, so the app is instant, and to a public blockchain ledger, so the count can be checked by someone who doesn't trust us.
That second write is the point. Any platform can show you a number. Far fewer let you verify that number independently — and a company that can silently edit its own results is asking you to take its word.
The ledger records that a ballot was cast and sealed. It does not record who you are.
Where this stands today
The public ledger is running in pilot phase on a test network while the system is proven. The method, the contract addresses and a worked example are published on the methodology page — including what is not yet finished.
What Represent does not do
It makes a count undeniable. That is all it makes.
It doesn't bind anyone
A Represent ballot is not a legal vote and does not obligate any government or institution to act. It produces evidence, not authority.
It doesn't prove a whole population
A result reflects the verified people who voted — not a random sample of everyone. It is a census of participants, not a poll.
It doesn't take a side
Represent has no position on any question asked on it. The only interest is that the count is real.
What you get
Ask as often as you like.
Pricing
By the size of your organization.
Members never pay anything. Identity verification is free to them — we carry that cost.
Free
$0
per month
Up to 25 members
Pro
$59
per month
Up to 250 members
Plus
$179
per month
Up to 1,000 members
Business
$499
per month
Up to 5,000 members
Government
Municipalities, agencies and public bodies — talk to us directly about scale, procurement and records requirements.
Verification unlock
If you want every member identity-verified before they can vote, that's a one-time fee by tier — $199 on Pro, $499 on Plus, $999 on Business — which covers your members' identity checks. Your members are never charged.
Why it matters
Most of the cost is the argument afterwards.
The expensive part of an internal vote isn't running it. It's the fortnight afterwards, when somebody claims the count was wrong, the turnout was unrepresentative, or people voted twice.
A ballot where every voter is a verified member, each counted once, with an exportable signed record, gives you something concrete to answer that with. That's what you're buying.
Inside the app
Four screens. Nothing you don't need.
Getting started
About three minutes, once.
1
Download and sign in
Apple or Google. No password to invent.
2
Verify your identity
A government ID and a short selfie check, about three minutes. Free, and your documents are never stored by Represent.
3
Vote
Your region comes from your ID, so the questions you see are the ones you're entitled to answer.