Democracy Works

Seth spent two summers in high school working at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and always planned to be an inventor – but when he got to college, plans changed. He couldn’t turn his back on what seemed like the greatest problem of our time, America’s broken democracy and dysfunctional government. He founded the Activist Council, which still annually mobilizes hundreds of students to participate in politics, and served as student body president, where he led the council in successfully lobbying Columbia to reform its financial aid policies.

After college, Seth worked as a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and asked himself the question that would drive his future work, “Why has the Internet revolutionized everything except government, and what could I do about it?” He sought answers by attending the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, working at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and founding TurboVote while completing his Masters in Public Policy. TurboVote has since been recognized by the Sunlight Foundation, Knight Foundation, and Google, and in 2011 Seth was named one of Forbes magazine’s “30 under 30” in the field of law and policy.