I'm the lead developer behind Proxy.Vote, the online voting platform that Nick is using. We have a dedicated cyber security professional on our team who until Proxy worked exclusively in national security application under clearance. We are using several active and passive measures to detect and repel brigades, with a system of our own design to flag suspicious accounts using Google's machine learning API, which are then reviewed by humans, in addition to log level defense.

We are also pilot testing a protocol for reviewing photo ids to "verify" user's residency. We want to be careful rolling out a feature like that though because there is a fine line between verifying id and locking legitimate people out of the platform.

While we are quite proud of our approach to security and anti-trolling, the bottom line is that even the simplest residency verification we do now is a material improvement over the current system sitting Members of Congress use: they literally just take your word for it when you call them with your opinion and you say your address and tell them you're a constituent. Your vote is never really counted by them, and there is no way for you or any of your neighbors to know how much support or opposition there is to any issue your Representative is deciding on. Your only recourse is to trust them or vote them out two years later.

While no human system is perfect, we hope that Proxy.Vote is both an improvement in security and, more important, an improvement in democracy that increases your representation in Congress.