Civitech co-founder and CEO Jeremy Smith joins Plutopia to discuss how technology, personal trust, and grassroots organizing can expand political participation in Texas and beyond. He explains how Civitech helps voters navigate registration, ballot access, and rejected ballots while equipping Democratic and progressive campaigns with data, tools, and practical support. The conversation explores misinformation, voting barriers, mail delays, and the ways election reporting can undermine public confidence. Jeremy argues that campaigns overlook enormous opportunities when they focus only on registered voters, emphasizing outreach to people who feel excluded or disengaged. His central message: technology can remove obstacles and strengthen organizing, but earning votes requires authentic relationships and sustained effort.
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Jeremy Smith:
Our approach is a lot more expertise-involved. We sell data and tools and we jump in to help. We have guides on how to run for office. We do training. We do office hours, put out reports, we do scientific studies, we trial programs ourselves with one of our PACs or nonprofits that we’re close with. And all of that is designed to learn, and to essentially bring expertise. So to the opening question, technology that other people don’t understand is not very helpful, even if they’ll buy it from us because they’re hoping—you know, our view is we’re a nonprofit and worker-owned B Corp, so we have a very different model. We’re not trying to be extractive, we are trying to have an impact. So we invest a lot more in the usage, what makes this technology easy to use and how can we help people deploy it. And that’s a little bit different kind of style that we have.
