'Anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy': Expensify's CEO tells us why the company emailed 10 million customers urging them to vote for Biden
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Expensify CEO David Barrett emailed 10 million of the company's customers on Thursday night urging them to vote for Joe Biden for president.
"Anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy," he wrote, adding that "a vote for Trump is to endorse voter suppression."
Barrett told Business Insider that Expensify employees contributed edits to the letter and that about two-thirds voted to send it, saying the letter's criticisms of President Donald Trump's voter-suppression efforts "are not radical ideas."
Expensify's endorsement stands in contrast to other tech companies, such as Facebook, Google, and Coinbase, that have recently cracked down on political discussions internally.
Expensify's approximately 10 million customers received an email on Thursday evening from CEO David Barrett with the subject line "Protect democracy, vote for Biden."
"We are facing an unprecedented attack on the foundations of democracy itself. If you are a US citizen, anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy," Barrett said in the email, adding that "a vote for Trump is to endorse voter suppression, it really is very basic."
The email went on to criticize the Trump administration's efforts to suppress voter turnout and its false claims about voter fraud. It urged Americans to vote for Biden on November 3.
"I wouldn't be sending this email if this election were just about 'normal issues' — taxes, legislative priorities, healthcare, etc.," Barrett wrote. "But it isn't. This election is a referendum on what limits, if any, we place on our elected leaders to govern us in a fair and representative way. This election will decide if widespread voter suppression is an acceptable governing tactic."
But while Barrett initially proposed the email, actually sending it was a mini democratic process.
He told Business Insider that several of Expensify's 130 or so employees provided input on the letter's content and that more than two-thirds, a "supermajority," ultimately voted to hit send.
"We've always been a very strongly values-driven organization, and we talk a lot about what we stand for, what we believe in, what we'll put our money and efforts behind," Barrett said.
"It might seem kind of, like, out of the blue, if you don't really know much about Expensify," he said, adding that the company has previously gotten involved in social issues such as subsidizing low-income families' groceries during the pandemic and engaging with local Black Lives Matter leaders in Portland, Oregon, where the company is based.
Barrett said that while there wasn't universal consensus on sending the letter, "the real world is messy and complicated."
"These are not radical ideas," he said, adding that it was important to take a stand on them nonetheless.
Expensify's decision to weigh in on the 2020 presidential race — and political and social issues more broadly — stands in stark contrast to some other tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, that have sought to limit internal discussion on hot-button issues. In a recent memo, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase declared an "apolitical culture" at the company and urged dissenters to leave, leading about 60 employees to do exactly that.
Barrett criticized Coinbase's approach as pretending to be apolitical while actually just supporting the status quo.
"If you are a member of a democratic society, you can't opt out of that. Choosing not to participate is also a choice — that is a political decision," he said. "If you are a company that chooses not to engage, that either means, one, our official company stance is that we like the status quo and want to keep it, or two is we don't like the status quo, but we're too cowardly to do anything about it."
Read the full email from Expensify CEO David Barrett below:
Read the original article on Business Insider
