about

Who We Are

Unhack was founded in 2018 and is a registered non-profit in Belgium.

 
 
 

Zsófia Banuta

Co-Founder

Zsófia is a socially conscious entrepreneur, who started her career as an international news producer, covering business and economy stories across Europe with a focus on the new EU countries. She is an activist in the UK and Hungary.

 
 

dr. Melani Barlai

Co-Founder

Melani is co-founder and coordinator of the Hungarian online voting advice application “Vokskabin ” whose primary goal is to advise citizens on issues which are socially most relevant and to help point out the differences between the positions of the political parties and our own opinions. She currently works for netPOL (Network Political Communication), an international academic political communications network at Andrássy University. She holds a PhD from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

 
 

dr. Anikó Szűcs

Creative Director

Anikó is the Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in the program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University. Her conviction that art is a powerful tool to advocate democracy and social justice led her to join forces with Unhack Democracy and facilitate collaborative projects between researchers and artists that educate larger audiences about the importance of electoral integrity, public accountability, and the trustworthiness of democratic institutions.

 
 

dr. Garvan Walshe

Co-Founder

Garvan is an Irish political strategist. A former foreign policy adviser to the British Conservative Party, after the Brexit referendum defeat, he turned his attention to protecting liberal democracy from authoritarian demagogues. He is a research associate at the Wilfred Martens Centre for European Studies and works with the ARENA programme at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He writes regularly for Foreign Policy and has been published in outlets including  Die Welt, Ha’aretz, The Guardian, The Economist, Rzeczpospolita and CNN. He holds a PhD from the University of Manchester and was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.


 
 

Elliott Goat

Co-Founder

Elliott is a British-based journalist focusing on human rights, politics and digital democracy. He is a winner of the Wyn Harness Journalist Award, contributor to the International State Crime Initiative and current Winston Churchill Memorial Fellow. He is an advisory board member of We Make Change, a social action social network.

 
 
 

Activists

Dedicated activists including developers, designers, mathematicians and researchers, who believe in free and fair elections.