About POPVOX

Built by people who have done the work.

POPVOX is a civic technology company founded by former legislative staffers. We know the realities of serving in a legislative body, and we build accordingly.

Our story

One mission, evolving with the problem.

Meet the team
2010

The engagement era

POPVOX launched to connect constituents and lawmakers: a transparent public record of who supported what, and why. We learned firsthand how legislatures process — and struggle to process — public input at scale.

2021

The capacity turn

The deeper problem was not engagement; it was capacity. Our team spun off POPVOX Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening legislatures through research, training, and direct work with representative bodies worldwide.

Now

The relaunch

AI changed what is possible. Technology that can read, connect, and organize legislative information at scale means institutions can finally leapfrog decades of deferred modernization. We relaunched POPVOX.com to build those tools.

The pacing problem

Democracy is friction-based. Technology is friction-minimizing.

The pacing problem lives in that tension.

A term coined by Dr. Gary Marchant.

External

Understanding change

Can members and staff understand emerging technology well enough to make effective policy?

Interbranch

Maintaining balance

Executive branches modernize and race ahead. Legislatures fall behind, making oversight harder and shifting power by default.

Internal

Building capacity

Legislatures run 21st-century responsibilities on outdated tools, burning scarce staff time on manual processes.

AI makes the pacing problem more urgent — and it is also the first technology that can help legislatures close the gap.

Institutional AI

A third route for high-trust institutions.

The AI market offers enterprise tools for corporate productivity and consumer tools for individual convenience. Neither fits a legislature.

Institutional AI is designed for institutions with constitutional responsibilities and heavy information-processing needs. It organizes records, surfaces connections, and drafts starting points. It never takes official action or replaces human judgment.

Each institution’s Constitution, governing framework, and procedures define where people stay in the loop.

What we believe

Legislative capacity is democratic infrastructure.

Legislatures are the heart of representative democracy.

They deserve tools as modern as the societies they govern.

The pacing problem is solvable.

Falling behind is an infrastructure problem, not an inevitability.

AI can responsibly boost capacity.

Possible and necessary — with humans in the loop where each institution’s constitutional framework requires them.

This applies at every level.

National parliaments, state legislatures, and city councils face the same structural questions.

Our team

People who know the work.

Former legislative staff and experienced technologists building with the institutions we serve.

Marci Harris

Co-founder / CEO

Marci Harris

JD/LLM

Marci co-founded POPVOX to make policymaking more transparent, accountable, and usable for people inside and outside government. Her work connects legislative process, civic participation, and technology for democratic institutions.

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As founder and CEO of POPVOX.com and the Executive Director of the nonprofit POPVOX Foundation, Marci is passionate about the responsible use of technology to improve government and benefit humanity. She is a lawyer and former Congressional staffer, who worked on the House Ways and Means Committee's Affordable Care Act team. She has held fellowships with Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democracy and the New America Foundation, and taught public policy, government, and civic technology courses at the University of San Francisco, San Jose State University, and the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of the forthcoming book RECONSTITUTION: A Blueprint for American Governance in the Age of Acceleration.

Ben Harris

Chief Operating Officer

Ben Harris

Ben manages the day-to-day operations of the company and supports hardware deployment and operations of legislative data infrastructure.

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Ben graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2001 where he earned a BS in Aviation Technology. He is an FAA Certified mechanic and commercial pilot. He is a “CO:founder” of theCO in Jackson, TN, a public-private partnership co-work, makerspace and code academy designed to bring cutting edge technology and education to rural West Tennessee. Ben is a 2005 graduate of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce “Leadership Jackson” program, and a proud Boy Scout board member.

Bryan Dease

Chief Technology Officer

Bryan Dease

Bryan leads the technical architecture and engineering behind POPVOX's legislative intelligence platform, building systems that make public data reliable, accessible, and ready for the AI era.

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Bryan has a passion for all areas of web technology from coding and deploying websites to maintaining servers and working on mobile platform solutions. In his own words his goal is to “support great design with solid code under the hood.” His main areas of expertise are PHP (Laravel), MySQL, Javascript, HTML5 and CSS. Bryan has worked with interactive studios based both in St. Louis and Tennessee. Most recently, with Anode in Nashville, he built interactive exhibits for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Nashville Public Library.

Anne Meeker

Director of Government Innovation

Anne Meeker

Anne bridges the gap between government institutions and modern technology, guiding innovation strategy that respects the complexities of democratic process.

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Anne Meeker is a former congressional casework director. She joined POPVOX, Inc. in 2020 and helped create the nonprofit POPVOX Foundation, where she served in a variety of roles including as Managing Director and created the Foundation's Casework Navigator program. Her testimony before the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress in 2024 inspired recommendations that led to the CaseCompass project. Anne holds a bachelor's degree in Anthropology from the University of Oxford and an MSc in History from the London School of Economics.

Abby Simmons

Intern

Abby Simmons

Abby is a recent graduate of Randolph-Macon College, where she studied political science, Spanish, and economics while pursuing publication of research related to U.S. immigration policy.

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She has professional experience as a session aide in the Virginia House of Delegates and as an intern in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she developed a passion for constituent services. In the coming year, she plans to pursue a master's degree in political science in Florence, Italy, with a concentration on European Union politics.

Board

Guidance grounded in civic technology and public service.

Marci Harris

Marci Harris

Founder and CEO, POPVOX

Rachna Choudhry

Rachna Choudhry

Co-founder, POPVOX

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After 10 years of advocacy and lobbying for nonprofit organizations, Rachna co-founded POPVOX based on her experiences and frustrations connecting with lawmakers. She offers grassroots advocacy strategy to organizations and serves on the board of PLEN, which trains women for policy careers.

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media

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Tim O'Reilly is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of O'Reilly Media and a partner at early stage venture firm O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. He has helped frame movements including open source software, Web 2.0, the Maker movement, and government as a platform.

POPVOX Inc. and POPVOX Foundation

Separate organizations. One mission.

POPVOX Inc. — this site — builds civic intelligence products for legislatures, lawmakers, organizations, and the public.

POPVOX Foundation is an independent nonprofit supporting legislative capacity, research, and modernization worldwide.

Legislatures equipped for the century they govern

That is the work.

Talk to our team