Team

Dan Wolf has spent four decades at the intersection of law, civic technology, and election integrity. His work in elections began in 1984, when as a Harvard Law student he spent the summer in Nicaragua researching the country's electoral system; the report he produced was the world's first country-specific election observer's manual.

In 2012 he was senior adviser to the US Senate's Election Observation Mission for the Taiwan presidential elections. In between, he pursued doctoral work in political science at UC San Diego (ABD), was founding director of the TransBorder Institute at the University of San Diego, founded Terra Segura International to develop humanitarian landmine-clearing technology, and built two technology companies around landmine and IED clearance. As CEO of a public company he became intimately acquainted with the rigors of SEC audits — and concluded that if the public interest in transparent finance justifies that level of oversight, the public interest in transparent elections justifies equal rigor.

He founded Democracy Counts in 2016 to act on that conviction. Its flagship app, Actual Vote, gives Americans the tools to independently audit their local election machinery in near-real time, across party lines, responsibly and peacefully. A decade of building it taught Dan the lesson that shapes his current work: good civic tools are not enough on their own; people have to believe civic engagement is worth their time. The Middle Majority Movement is his answer to that lesson. After years circling the same question — why the structural solution to congressional dysfunction remains unbuilt, when the leverage point is obvious and the civic resources to exploit it already exist in every district — he concluded that the missing piece was the lack of coordination infrastructure. Churches, unions, business associations, and neighborhood groups already have the numbers in every district. They have never had a tool, a process, or a reason to act together in a primary or close election. MMM is the infrastructure that empowers them to do this - and as a result, to restore the American republic.

He holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, is a Fulbright Fellow and a Fellow of the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Foundation. He lives in San Diego.

Contact: d.wolf@democracycounts.org LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danielhwolf