Ten years ago Seth Flaxman, then a student at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, became seriously worried about the state of American democracy. At the time, he was in a minority.

The US had just elected its first African-American president and Washington was abuzz with Barack Obama’s promises of hope and change. The country seemed to be overcoming its racist past. The first decade of the 21st century had been imbued with political optimism.

“It was a lonely time to be telling people that our democracy wasn’t working,” says Flaxman, who had become alarmed by low turnout in a number of polls in this period. So much so that when he co-founded a digital platform to make it easier for people to vote, it struggled to gain attention from would-be funders.