Thor Prohaska
A long-running attempt to answer one question: how can ordinary people have meaningful democratic influence over decisions that affect them?
The person behind Verify
Thor Prohaska’s interest in democracy began unusually early.
As a child, he remembers watching politicians move between ministerial portfolios and wondering how any one person could possibly possess enough knowledge to make good decisions across such different fields.
If the knowledge needed to make good decisions already exists throughout society, how can we organise that knowledge and connect it effectively to the people making decisions?
It is a question that has shaped much of his work since.
From snowboarding to democracy
In the mid-1980s, Thor became involved in the development of snowboarding in Australia and founded the Snowboard Riders of Victoria.
At the time, snowboarding was new and was prohibited at a number of Victorian ski resorts. Working to have the sport recognised brought him into direct contact with organisations, committees, established interests and decision-making processes that often seemed poorly equipped to respond to change.
The experience turned an existing unease about democracy and decision-making into a practical question: what was not working, and could a better process be designed?
That thinking eventually led to the conception of VoteWrap.
The first VoteWrap
VoteWrap began not as software, but as a method.
Its first implementation was a paper-based process used within a community environmental organisation.
The basic idea was to find a better way for a group to understand the views of its members and work towards decisions without simply reducing every question to a winner, a loser and a 51–49 vote.
From the beginning, the objective was broader than voting. It was about finding ways for the knowledge, priorities and judgement distributed throughout a community to be organised and used.
Anthem Australia
The next major experiment was Anthem Australia.
Thor proposed improved words for Australia’s national anthem and saw the anthem question as an opportunity to test something much larger.
The plan was to take one understandable national issue to the Australian people and, through that process, establish a network through which Australians could participate directly — or through someone representing them — in other issues that interested them.
Anthem Australia therefore became a vehicle for developing and testing the ideas behind VoteWrap.
The project did not achieve the national participation Thor had envisaged, but it produced another important lesson: the process needed technology capable of organising participation at scale.
He subsequently built the first computerised VoteWrap prototype in Microsoft Excel.
Searching for a way to build it
The initial intention was to develop VoteWrap as an open-source project.
Thor approached people in the open-source and technology communities, hoping others would recognise the potential of the idea and help build it. They did not see what he saw, and those approaches went nowhere.
After seeing The Social Network and the story of Facebook’s early development, he considered a different route: perhaps VoteWrap needed to be built as a commercial technology venture.
Attempts to interest investors encountered another barrier. The response was essentially that the concept needed a substantial user base before investment would be considered — while building that user base itself required resources.
Once again, the project reached an impasse.
Entering politics
Thor had previously made a personal commitment that he would not enter electoral politics until VoteWrap had been built.
The election of Queensland’s Newman Government in 2012 changed that.
His reaction was strong enough that he abandoned the commitment and took the next opportunity to stand for Federal Parliament in 2013.
There were two hopes behind that decision. One was that participation in an election campaign might provide the exposure and connections needed to get VoteWrap built. The other was that, if elected, the position itself could provide the recognition and resources needed to put the concept into practical operation.
Neither happened. But standing for election opened another path of learning.
Seven election campaigns
From 2013, Thor went on to stand for elected office seven times at federal and state level.
This included three federal campaigns in the Queensland electorate of Dickson, standing against Peter Dutton in 2016, 2019 and 2022.
The campaigns provided first-hand experience of political parties, independents, campaigning, electoral systems, voter engagement and the practical relationship between elected representatives and the communities they are supposed to represent.
Each campaign also became another experiment in democratic participation.
Over time, this experience led to a change in strategy: away from trying primarily to achieve democratic reform by winning elections, and toward building democratic infrastructure that could strengthen participation continuously between elections.
Elections remain important. But the experience of seven campaigns reinforced a central problem: for most citizens, meaningful democratic participation largely stops once an election is over, while governments and parliaments continue making decisions every day.
The deeper opportunity was therefore not simply to elect different people. It was to build a better connection between people and the decisions made in their name.
From VoteWrap to Vote4Democracy
That accumulated experience has led to the present Vote4Democracy Project.
Vote4Democracy begins with something concrete: real legislation currently being considered by the Australian Parliament. People can browse bills without registering, understand what Parliament is considering, indicate what matters to them and follow issues in which they have an interest.
But parliamentary bills are only the starting point.
Vote4Democracy is also being developed to allow people to raise and participate in issues that have not originated as legislation. These may concern local community matters, state or federal policy, proposals for change, emerging problems or questions that people believe deserve collective attention.
Over time, state and local legislation and laws can also be incorporated alongside federal parliamentary bills.
The aim is to create one place where people can engage with democratic activity across local, state and federal levels, rather than having participation fragmented across separate institutions, websites and processes.
An issue might begin with a concern raised by people in a local community. It may remain local, develop into a broader campaign, require action from a council or state government, or eventually lead to legislative change. Vote4Democracy is intended to provide continuity through that process rather than treating each stage as a separate democratic activity.
From there, participation can deepen naturally. Someone may simply browse. They may register for updates, indicate which issues or legislation matter to them, participate in a local Community Catchup, contribute knowledge or research, vote directly when a matter reaches a decision stage, or choose someone they trust to represent them.
The objective is democratic infrastructure that accommodates different levels of interest, knowledge and available time rather than expecting everyone to participate in the same way.
Ultimately, Vote4Democracy is intended not simply as a better way to follow Parliament, but as a common democratic space in which people can discover, raise, understand, discuss and participate in the decisions that affect them — from their local community through to the national level.
Building it in the real world
Today, the work is being developed through Verify Pty Ltd and the Vote4Democracy Project, with a practical community base being established through the Lawnton Community Catchups on Brisbane’s north side.
After decades of concepts, prototypes, campaigns, successes, failures and lessons, the emphasis is now on building the system incrementally and testing it with real people around real decisions.
How can society organise the knowledge, experience and judgement it already possesses so that people can participate meaningfully in the decisions that affect them?
Verify exists to help turn the answers to that question into working infrastructure.