Communiqué
The coordination layer democracy never built.
About
The problem it solves Every power structure that governs your life — your congressional representative, your HOA board, your school district, your hospital district, your landlord, your employer, your utility company — has the same accountability gap: there is no infrastructure for organized, verified, privacy-preserving constituent pressure. > One complaint gets filed. 5,000 coordinated messages get meetings. **But today, coordination fails in three ways:** 1. **Participation means surveillance.** To contact your representative, you surrender your home address. To organize tenants, you expose yourself to retaliation. To pressure your employer, you risk your job. Every advocacy platform is a data broker's dream. The cost of civic participation is your privacy. 2. **Institutions can't tell real people from bots.** [Staff report that most digital constituent contact has minimal policy value.](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19331681.2020.1740907) School boards, HOA boards, and hospital districts face the same problem — when anyone can submit a form, no submission carries weight. There is no cryptographic difference between 10,000 real constituents and a script. 3. **There's no economic counterweight to lobbying.** Corporations spend $4.4B/year on professional lobbying infrastructure. Citizens get a webform. Effective civic coordination — the kind that produces the [Kansas City 247-day rent strike](https://shelterforce.org/2025/07/29/striking-tenants-withhold-rent-for-247-days-and-win/), [the Boeing 38% raise](https://www.psca.org/news/psca-news/2024/11/boeing-workers-union-gets-38-pay-raise-and-up-to-12-401k-contribution/), or [Missouri Prop A](https://mochamber.com/news-archive/proposition-a-what-employers-need-to-know/) — happens despite the tools, not because of them. --- ### Communique + VOTER Protocol **Communique + VOTER Protocol is cryptographic coordination infrastructure for holding any power structure accountable.** A user verifies their identity once — free, in-browser. From that point forward, a single zero-knowledge proof generated on their device proves membership across all layers of democratic governance simultaneously — congressional district, state senate, county, city council, school board, water district, hospital district, transit authority, and more — without revealing their name, address, or any personal information. The address never leaves the browser. **What people use it for:** * **Legislative advocacy** — Send ZK-verified messages to Congress, state legislatures, and city councils. Offices see "847 cryptographically verified constituents sent this" instead of "847 emails from unknown senders." Adapters support US (CWC API), UK (WriteToThem), and any legislature reachable by email. * **School board and special district accountability** — The same proof that establishes your congressional district also proves your school district, library district, fire district, and community college district. Coordinate verified parent/resident pressure on boards that govern your kids' schools and your local services. * **Tenant and workplace organizing** — Coordinate rent strikes, union card campaigns, and employer accountability with cryptographic privacy. Threshold signatures ensure anonymity sets of 10+ before revealing participation counts. Landlords and employers see coordinated, verified pressure — not individual targets for retaliation. * **Corporate, university, and nonprofit governance** — Verified stakeholder pressure on any institution. A certified arborist challenging an HOA's tree removal policy, a nurse pressuring a hospital board on staffing ratios, a CPACC-certified consultant pushing a university on accessibility — each carries a cryptographically verified credibility multiplier from state licensing APIs. * **Astroturf-proof coordination** — Every campaign carries a Coordination Authenticity Index: the ratio of ZK-verified senders to anonymous supporters. Example: Genuine grassroots shows 5-15% conversion. Astroturf shows 45,000 clicks and 23 proofs. On-chain engagement tiers (earned over months of diverse civic participation, not purchasable) make fake campaigns detectable. * **Portable civic reputation** — Engagement history accrues as a soulbound on-chain credential. Action count, diversity of participation, and tenure combine into an engagement tier (0-4) that travels across campaigns and institutions. It cannot be bought, sold, or delegated — only earned. Use of AI tools and agents - claude code to develop. implementation: agent teams + subagents across two sessions where voter-protocol and communique repos were added to the env/session. strategy: a third session with access to both repos in communique: - subject/core message resolver agent takes someone's vibe on a concern & expresses it with salient, professional yet emotional intention - decision-maker resolver agent calls Exa search & Firecrawl, semantically compresses/maps pages while choosing to load pages with likely hits for email addresses - message generation agent searches for authoritative sources & constructs a narrative and call to action on the issue, grounding the user's expressed intention in what current information exists in the world
How it's made
Challenges we ran into Scoping down what's possible while being at ethdenver. It was hard to make time to deal with: - fragmentation between old UI iterations & refactored mechanisms for proving personhood - agentic system design for resolving decision-maker emails cheaply, quickly & reliably. pick two? aimed for cheaply + reliably, but tried my best to balance all 3 - converging on reputation, identity providers/methods - keeping the proof calldata efficiently stored on-chain. I used the Scroll L2 verifier, which stores the full transaction—I'll need to wrap/rollup with groth16 to keep this efficient at scale - revising the ZKP circuit to prove user identity, public district membership & reputation/engagement record - integrating ZKP and identity verification via mobile wallet; currently fixing this. ran integration test on backend to verify address->district via DistrictGate entry point in voter-protocol on Scroll Sepolia https://sepolia.scrollscan.com/address/0x0085DFAd6DB867e7486A460579d768BD7C37181e - handling both mailto: links and congressional delivery APIs in a single user interaction to send a message. will deploy an email receiving SMTP server to forward to congress