At Tuta, we’re proud to support projects like HowTheyVote.eu because their mission is tightly aligned with ours: empowering people through transparency and they too are open source. Learn here whether your open source project qualifies for a Tuta software donation as well.

Democracy needs accessible data

HowTheyVote.eu is a great website that compiles freely available data about votes of the EU Parliament in an easily accessible format. Because what is published by the EU itself, is not what’s needed.

Yes, the European Parliament does publish vote results. But they’re spread across multiple platforms, in different formats, and released in such ways that it’s more chaotic than helpful. For citizens, journalists, researchers, and activists, it can be a frustrating maze.

“While the European Parliament publishes information about plenary activities such as vote results, information is scattered across different websites and portals, and often published at different times and in different formats. So while the data is public, in practice, it can be quite difficult to actually find or work with it.”

“We were looking for something much more accessible than what the European Parliament provides. We couldn’t find that, so we decided to build it ourselves. But ideally, we think the European Parliament should provide this service, and we’d be more than happy to shut down HowTheyVote.eu once it does!”

But since the EU does not provide easily accessible data, the two developers in Berlin decided to cut through the noise and build HowTheyVote.eu, a searchable, human-friendly interface that compiles and structures vote data from official sources. The result is a simple, trustworthy tool that makes it possible to find out - quickly and easily - what was voted on, how the vote turned out, and where each MEP stood.

Open source and secure inboxes

For the creators of HowTheyVote.eu it was clear from the start that the project had to be open source. The team is active on GitHub, welcomes feedback, and publishes all their data under an open license. That means researchers and journalists can build on their work and use any and all data available if needed.

Choosing Tuta Mail was an easy decision because of Tuta’s clear focus on open source. For a long time, the project relied on personal email accounts, but at some point they decided to set up a professional inbox with their custom domain, they wanted something that aligned with their principles: no tracking, no data exploitation, and solid privacy standards: Tuta Mail.

“We send and receive a lot of email – from users, journalists, project partners, … For a long time, we just used our personal email accounts for email communication related to HowTheyVote.eu. That was a bit messy, and so at some point we decided to set up a separate email inbox for the project.”

“When it comes to personal data, we believe in data minimization. On HowTheyVote.eu, we don’t set tracking cookies, we don’t embed third-party services, and we use technical service providers that are based in the EU. So Tuta was a perfect fit in that regard.”

Our secure email service was a good match - not just because of our quantum-safe encryption, but because of our shared values. Like HowTheyVote.eu, we’re open source. We don’t use Google Push. We don’t harvest metadata. And we’re based in Germany, which matters when you’re serious about GDPR compliance and data protection.

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Tools that reflect values

For the HowTheyVote.eu team, switching to Tuta Mail meant finally having a dedicated inbox for everything project-related. The Webmail client is lightweight and distraction-free. Custom domain support works out of the box. And most importantly, it sends a clear signal: this project walks the talk when it comes to data minimization and open source.

“We of course highly appreciate Tuta Mail being an open-source product! Additionally, the simplicity of the Webmail-Client is very nice - in some sense, it’s “just e-mail”, without any clutter. Easy support for custom domains was also very important to us.”

And with the EU Commission pushing legislation that threatens encryption – i.e. the controversial Chat Control draft - it’s more important than ever that projects focused on democratic transparency also choose communication tools that defend digital rights.

At Tuta, we’re excited to be part of HowTheyVote.eu’s journey. We highly appreciate what the team is doing for our democracy here in Europe and how they help journalists, researchers and citizens to stay informed and make informed choices.

We’re proud to support their mission and we look forward to seeing their impact grow across Europe.

Ps: If you’d like to learn more, follow them on our favorite social platform – Mastodon - or Bluesky.