You'd be right to ask the question. A US-based founder building civic technology for American communities — why not host it in the US?
Because US law is the problem.
The structural vulnerability of US jurisdiction
The legal tools available to US federal authorities for compelling data disclosure are broad, well-established, and increasingly deployed against civic actors. The CLOUD Act (2018) grants US authorities the power to compel data from any US-incorporated company, regardless of where the data is physically stored. FISA Section 702 enables warrantless surveillance of foreign communications that transit US infrastructure. And National Security Letters — of which over 50,000 were issued in 2022 alone, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation — can compel disclosure with gag orders that prevent the recipient from revealing the demand was made.
These are not theoretical risks. In 2025, the Department of Justice targeted ActBlue's 14 million donors for investigation. The FBI infiltrated encrypted Signal chats of immigrant-rights activists. Apple and Google removed ICE-tracking apps from their app stores under federal pressure. Free Press documented approximately 200 attacks on First Amendment protections in a single year.
For a platform that stores political preferences, the implication is direct: any US-incorporated entity that holds political data can be compelled to disclose it, often without the ability to inform the affected users.
What Swiss jurisdiction provides
Switzerland offers structural protections that no US-based alternative can replicate.
Article 271 of the Swiss Criminal Code makes it a criminal offense — punishable by up to three years imprisonment — to perform acts on Swiss soil on behalf of a foreign government without authorization. This includes complying with foreign data demands. This is not a company policy that a new board can reverse. It is federal statute, in force since 1937, upheld repeatedly by Swiss courts.
The Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) classifies political opinions as sensitive personal data under Article 5(c), requiring the highest standard of protection. Switzerland is not a member of the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, or Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing alliances. Swiss courts have consistently blocked attempts to extend foreign jurisdiction into Swiss data governance.
The combination creates a legal environment where political data processed in Switzerland has protections that are structurally unavailable under US law — regardless of how well-intentioned any individual US company might be.
How Open Caucus uses this
Our US entity, Quiet and Helpful LLC (Minneapolis, MN), handles business administration: marketing, payments, contractor agreements. It is architecturally separated from data processing — so that even if compelled by US legal process, the US entity has no access path to individual political data on Swiss infrastructure.
All data processing happens on Swiss-hosted servers operated under Swiss data protection law. The architecture is designed so that political data does not enter US-accessible infrastructure in any form that could identify an individual user.
What we can't claim yet — and when that changes
We are currently a Minnesota LLC. Article 271 protects data processed on Swiss infrastructure, but our corporate structure does not yet have the full protections of a Swiss-domiciled entity. We plan to form a Swiss AG (corporation) as a near-term priority, at which point the Swiss entity becomes the data controller and Article 271's protections extend to the corporate entity itself.
Until then, the architectural separation — US operations have no access path to Swiss-hosted political data — is the primary protection. This is meaningful, but it is not the same as having a Swiss-domiciled data controller. We state this clearly because the communities we serve deserve accuracy, not premature claims.
The long-term architecture includes multiple entities across jurisdictions, each adding structural safeguards that cannot be reversed by any single actor — including us. Read about the full governance vision in The Data Cooperative.
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