Matt Koesters

Founder and President

Matt Koestersis the founder and president of Fortify Democracy. A Cincinnati-based, former award-winning journalist and public relations professional, Koesters founded Fortify Democracy in 2025 to future-proof American democracy against authoritarian capture by addressing the structural root causes of the dysfunction that permeates our system today. 

As a reporter, Koesters witnessed the effects of the structural flaws in the plurality voting system used in the vast majority of American elections. In 2014, he covered a three-way sheriff’s race in Clark County, Indiana, in which the winner needed just 37.7% of the vote to prevail — a made possible by vote-splitting. Both of the winning candidate’s opponents drew their support from the county’s electoral majority. 

In 2016, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination despite being the most unfavorably viewed candidate in the field. Trump's victory — enabled by vote-splitting among several establishment candidates — confirmed what Koesters had witnessed in that Indiana sheriff's race: Our electoral system's design flaws create pathways for minority rule, the mechanism that makes extremist capture possible.

Professional Background

Koesters brings two decades of experience serving the public across journalism, higher education, and strategic communications:

• Award-winning journalist covering politics, government, economic development, and transportation for daily newspapers.

• Public Information Officer at the University of Cincinnati, a Research 1 public university, where he managed university-level public relations efforts for key business units, colleges and university-wide initiatives. 

• Senior Account Executive at Rasor, a Cincinnati PR, marketing and communications agency, where he served as media relations lead, managed public engagement for federally funded transportation projects and plans, developed strategic plans for economic development agencies, and provided media training to decision-makers.

Personal Commitment

Whether as a journalist, university communicator, or strategic advisor, Koesters’ career has always been about serving the public and making the world a better place. Fortify Democracy represents the ultimate expression of that commitment.

"As a country, I know for certain that we can do so much better than what we have right now,” Koesters says. “People have been pitted against one another by bad actors who have leveraged the flaws in our electoral system to take control. It’s well past time for America to address those flaws so that we can get back to being the indivisible nation our founders envisioned.” 

Koesters has self-funded the initial development of Fortify Democracy and its strategic framework. This is more than just a bet on himself. It's a bet on the value of the ideas at the heart of this organization: that we can future-proof American democracy against extremism by upgrading our electoral infrastructure to eliminate the mathematical flaws that empower extremist factions.