What about people without internet access?

People without reliable internet would be left out of an online-only version of My Vote Forward, and they are not a rounding error: Pew Research Center’s 2026 data show that 22% of United States adults lack home broadband, rising to 43% among adults in households earning under $30,000. The framework’s position is that any real deployment must include paper, phone, and in-person assisted channels with equal standing, and that online-only results must never be presented as the public’s view. None of those channels exists today; the project is websites and a demo.

The objection in its strongest form

The objection to My Vote Forward here is that participation without internet is not an edge case to be handled later but the test of whether the framework is democratic at all. Elections reach people through polling places, mail, and assistance, and election law in many places requires accommodations. A framework built around phones and passkeys starts from the people easiest to reach and promises to add everyone else eventually. In practice, the critic says, “eventually” never arrives, because offline channels are expensive and online channels are cheap, and the people left out are the same people already underrepresented: lower-income, older, rural, disabled, and those with limited English.

The objection also challenges the fallback. Paper or phone channels attached to an online system are often treated as second class: harder to find, slower to count, and reported separately or not at all. Equal standing, the critic says, is easy to promise and rare in practice.

Why the objection matters

Access matters for My Vote Forward because the framework’s purpose is to make participation between elections more informative for institutions. If results systematically omit people without internet, institutions will hear least from the groups they already hear least from. This is the access side of a problem discussed in doesn’t this favor the tech-savvy?, which concerns skill and comfort as well as access.

Defined terms

• Home broadband: a high-speed internet subscription at home, as measured in Pew’s surveys.
• Smartphone-only: having a smartphone but no home broadband.
• Offline channel: a way to participate without the internet, such as a paper form, a phone line, or an in-person session.
• Assisted participation: participation with help from a trained person, who must not influence the answers.
• Equal standing: a rule that every channel’s responses are counted under the same method and reported together, with channel shown where group sizes allow.

Evidence

Internet access in the United States is high but uneven. Pew Research Center’s 2026 fact sheet, based on 5,511 adults surveyed January 30 to June 18, 2026, reports that 97% of adults use the internet and 78% have home broadband.⁠¹ Among adults in households earning under $30,000, 91% use the internet but 57% have home broadband, and 29% are smartphone-only.⁠¹ Among adults 65 and older, home broadband is 71%; among rural adults, 72%.⁠¹ Pew notes that 16% of adults overall are smartphone-only.⁠¹ The 3% who do not use the internet at all are a small share but, across the adult population, a large number of people; the fact sheet’s percentages do not by themselves say how many would participate if offered another channel.

Long-running participation programs have been built around in-person meetings. Porto Alegre, Brazil, implemented its participatory budget in 1989; the city describes 17 regions and six thematic areas, with 23 regional and thematic assemblies, usually held from July to August, where residents choose investment priorities and elect councillors and delegates.⁠² The city’s page does not describe online voting in the process.⁠² See the Porto Alegre case.

New York City’s participatory budgeting combined in-person assemblies and paper ballots. Celina Su reports that lower-income and foreign-born residents were “more likely to learn about PB through word-of-mouth or targeted campaigns,” that mobile or pop-up voting sites were more likely to reach lower-income and undocumented residents, and that in one district “over two thirds of distributed ballots were in languages other than English”.⁠³ She also reports that in East Harlem the very poor were 4% of voters in the 2009 council elections and 22% of participatory budgeting voters.⁠³ These results come from one program with substantial outreach.

Even the most digital official system keeps offline channels. In Estonia’s 2023 parliamentary election, online voters were 51.1% of participating voters,⁠⁴ which means nearly half of those who voted did so another way.

How comparable systems have handled it

The comparable systems use three approaches.

• Offline first. Porto Alegre’s assemblies.⁠²
• Mixed channels with outreach. New York City’s assemblies, paper ballots in multiple languages, and pop-up sites.⁠³
• Online as an alternative, not a replacement. Estonia’s internet voting alongside polling places.⁠⁴

None of these is cheap, and the programs that reached underrepresented groups did so through staff time and community partners.

Competing interpretations

One interpretation holds that offline channels are a transitional cost: as access approaches universality, online participation will become adequate, and money spent on paper is money not spent on outreach.

A second interpretation holds that the people without internet will never be a negligible group, because access is tied to income, age, disability, and geography, and that offline channels are permanent infrastructure.

A third interpretation holds that offline channels are not enough by themselves; what matters is outreach that brings people into whatever channel they use, as Su’s findings on word-of-mouth and targeted campaigns suggest.⁠³

What the framework answers

My Vote Forward’s commitments for any real deployment:

• Paper, phone, and in-person assisted channels. These are design requirements with the same questions, same list versions, and same counting method as online participation.
• Equal standing in releases. Offline responses are counted under the same rules and reported together, with channel shown where group sizes pass privacy review. See published releases.
• Trained assistance with safeguards. Helpers must not see or influence private answers beyond what the participant requests. This connects to the framework’s concern about pressure; see can a household coerce a remote voter?.
• No online-only claims. A release from online-only participation says so in its headline, not only in its methods.
• Accessible and low-bandwidth design for those with limited connections. See disability access.

Hypothetical example. A library system hosts weekly in-person sessions where residents complete the priority ranking on paper with a staff member available for questions. Paper forms are entered by two staff members independently and compared. The release shows how many responses came from paper and whether their rankings differed from online responses.

Where the objection still wins

The objection wins on the present. The project has no offline channel, no assistance program, no partners, and no budget for outreach, and the critic’s concern that “eventually” never arrives is reasonable for any project at this stage. Offline channels also bring their own risks: paper must be stored and transcribed, phone systems must authenticate callers, and assisted sessions can expose answers to helpers. The framework has not designed these in detail, and it has no evidence about whether offline participants would take part.

Unresolved questions

• What is the minimum offline capacity a pilot needs before its results can be published?
• How can phone participation be authenticated without excluding people who lack identity documents?
• Who should run assisted sessions so that helpers are trusted and do not influence answers?
• Should results be published at all from a pilot that reached few offline participants?

Related

• Doesn’t this favor the tech-savvy?
• Unequal participation
• Language access
• Participatory budgeting
• Hard questions