Yes I know we can register a UG, but in the end you don't. And it is not just the share capital that is annoying it is everything else.
It literally costs 10x more to do the bookkeeping for a German company vs a UK one. Plus getting investors is much more difficult because of the notary requirements.
We used a SPV for our first round, but even that is annoying. I had some angel investors pull out purely because we are a German GmbH.
just to be clear - the 61 duplicate voting cases were only for Ohio and Pennsylvania - the 400k duplicate profiles were across all 7 states we looked at.
Indeed there is certainly not mass voter fraud. We were glad not to find that, but tbh surprised that we found any at all. Originally we were only going to look for duplicate profiles - it didn't even occur to us to look for actual fraud.
But why not make it a complete non-issue? It would be so easy to fix this data so there were no duplicates, then there would not even be any accusations like there were in 2020.
What I want to create is complete trust in the data to avoid the... bickering later.
/edit - as the poster below mentions, the 61 were just the ones that were manually confirmed. There were 1000 potential cases.
We come from Germany - where there is unlikely to be a big issue, as citizens have to be quite careful about registering where they live in one place only.
I suspect the data in the UK (where I originate) would be pretty messy. The voting lists there are a free for all, I reckon!
This is a problem I also have as a founder of a German company. Meetup literally can't add the company name to the invoice unless it is in the credit card name.
Indeed, unfortunately with the John Smiths of this world there will be false positive matches. What we could do is add that they need to be from the same town/postcode, but then that is quite an unreliable attribute too.
Similarly, there are a lot of false negatives where we know two records should match, but we could not because that would require a rule that would create more false positives.
In the end, it was the best we could do with the public view of the data. If we were working with the data Companies House actually holds itself, it would of course be much better.
Yes I know we can register a UG, but in the end you don't. And it is not just the share capital that is annoying it is everything else.
It literally costs 10x more to do the bookkeeping for a German company vs a UK one. Plus getting investors is much more difficult because of the notary requirements.
We used a SPV for our first round, but even that is annoying. I had some angel investors pull out purely because we are a German GmbH.