Is mobile voting the future? It could boost turnout and reduce polarization. Piloted in some states, it has the potential to transform elections nationwide.
In an age when our smartphones have become extensions of ourselves, allowing us to summon a ride, order dinner, or transfer money with a few taps, why can’t we use the same technology to participate in the most fundamental act of democracy — voting?
Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist, philanthropist, and political strategist, believes voters, using a smartphone app, could cast ballots securely from anywhere, potentially increasing turnout.
He explains that by engaging more moderate voters — especially in primaries — mobile voting could reduce political polarization and encourage more centrist policies.
In fact, Tusk believes this could lead to a more responsive democracy. He details exactly how mobile voting would work, along the model of other secure mobile transactions, using encryption, biometric verification, and blockchain technology. He points to successful pilot programs in several states that, if widely adopted, could fundamentally change how we view elections, making them more accessible and frequent without jeopardizing the security and privacy of the individual ballot.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In an age where our smartphones have become extensions of ourselves, where we can summon a ride, order dinner, or transfer money with a few taps, why can’t we use them to participate in the most fundamental act of democracy, voting? That’s the provocative question at the heart of my guest Bradley Tusk’s mission to bring mobile voting to America. As our political landscape grows increasingly fractured and polarized, Tusk argues that our democracy isn’t just strained, it’s fundamentally broken. But he believes the solution may be hiding in plain sight, or more accurately, in our pockets.
His vision of smartphone-based voting isn’t just about convenience. It’s a bold attempt to increase turnout, reduce polarization, and drag our electoral system, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. But as with any radical reimagining of our democratic process, Tusk’s idea raises tough questions. How can we ensure the security of millions of votes cast over the internet when nothing, including our banking information, seems secure? Will increased accessibility lead to a more engaged and representative electorate, or will greater participation lead to more polarization? And what might we lose when we trade the communal experience of the polling place for the solitude of our screens?
There is no question that this provocative idea has the potential to reshape American democracy. But what about the technology behind mobile voting? What are the results of pilot programs already underway? And what’s possible from both a technical and political perspective?
Bradley Tusk is a venture capitalist, political strategist, and philanthropist who’s no stranger to disrupting entrenched systems. He began his career in politics serving as a campaign manager for Michael Bloomberg and as a communications director for Senator Chuck Schumer. Later, as Uber’s first political advisor, he spearheaded the ride-sharing company’s efforts to enter new markets.
Now as the founder of Tusk Philanthropies and the Mobile Voting Project, he’s turned his attention to what he sees as the most critical challenge facing our democracy. His recent book is entitled Vote by Phone. It is my pleasure to welcome Bradley Tusk back to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. Bradley, thanks so much for joining us.
Bradley Tusk: Jeff, thank you so much for having me back. I really appreciate it.
Jeff: It is a delight to have you here. I want to begin by talking about what you see as the fundamental nexus between the state of democracy today and the actual physical way that we cast our votes.
Bradley: It’s asymmetrical. The state of democracy, unfortunately, is extremely polarized, extremely partisan, extremely dysfunctional. We either have the absolute chaos of Washington DC, or we have totally one-sided government, whether that’s where you are in San Francisco on the left, or, as we were talking before we started recording, about the state of Texas on the right. In my view, none of that is good. The reason we have that is because the way that we vote doesn’t fit with the way that we live. We ask people to, on a random Tuesday, go somewhere. And look, when the presidential election in a couple of weeks happens, will people do that? Yes, about 60%, 70% will. And there are states with things like mail-in voting, and that is helping with participation. But overall, there’s a reason why turnout, especially in primaries, which is really the election that matters because the gerrymandering is typically 10% to 15%. And the result is the people who vote are either the far left or the far right, or special interests who know how to move money in votes in low-turnout elections. And they not only dictate who wins the office, they dictate what those people do once they’re in office.
And if we want to get a government where people feel comfortable working together, compromising, having consensus, being bipartisan – not just trying to appeal to a small slice of a very ideological base on either side – you have to radically increase primary turnout. And I think we can do that by meeting people where they are, which is everyone listening to this podcast, by definition, has a smartphone. And 97% of Americans under the age of 50 have smartphones, even 76% of Americans over the age of 65 have smartphones. And I believe the time has come to make voting on our phone available.
Jeff: And one of the things that you talk about is that this doesn’t eliminate, potentially, other kinds of voting. This is in addition to, at least in its primary stages.
Bradley: Absolutely. I think all forms of voting are good. I think mail-in voting is good. I think early voting is great. But nonetheless, we also live in a world where clearly the way that we vote is too inconvenient for a lot of people. And I also think about– I dropped my daughter off at college for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and when we moved her in, they gave her a key for her dorm room. Fine. They gave her a key for the bike room. Fine. It didn’t occur to me when I got back to New York that a mailroom key or mailbox key or mail in general never came up once. And the truth is, even though she would like to vote in this election, I bet she’s not going to because she wouldn’t even know what to do with the mail ballot. She’s 18, but I guarantee since you and I just started this conversation a few minutes ago, she’s already checked her phone 41 times. And if she could vote on her phone, she probably would. And that’s true for a lot of people everywhere. So why not try to make it easier to vote?
Jeff: And is there any indication from the pilot programs that have taken place, and you’ll talk about those, but any indication that it impacts the outcome? That it has an impact on how we see results from that kind of voting?
Bradley: Yes. All the pilots to date have been pretty small. So they’ve been in seven different states and it’s been for either deployed military or people with disabilities. We’re talking groups of a couple of thousand voters here and there. But what we have seen is that turnout has increased materially when people have the option of voting on their phone. So in really small batches, it’s not going to change the outcome or change the way that people behave once they’re in office. But at scale, it could materially change all of that.
And the way I got the idea for all this is, as you mentioned, I was Uber’s first political advisor and I ran a lot of the campaigns around the US to legalize Uber and ride-sharing. And at the time, we were a tiny little tech startup and taxi was a big muscular industry with lobbyists, political connections, and all that stuff. And the way that we were able to survive is through the app. We made it possible for our customers to tell their elected officials, “Hey, I really like this Uber thing. Please don’t take it away from me,” and millions of people did. And that’s how we won every single market in the country. And when that was happening, it hit me like, “These same people who are advocating for us, they don’t know who their city council person is. They don’t vote in state Senate primaries, but when we made it really easy, all of a sudden, they participated.”
So the question became, well, what would happen if they could vote like this? So that’s what led to the creation of the Mobile Voting Project in 2017. We then funded elections, as I’ve mentioned, in seven different states for deployed military and people with disabilities. Since then, we’ve been building our own mobile voting technology, and I can walk you through how that’s going to work. And then I wrote this book because it’s really time to kick off Phase III, which is passing legislation in states all over the country that will allow people writ large to vote on their phones.
That’s going to be a great battle because people on both sides of the aisle who are currently in power are not interested in making it easier for them to risk losing power. So I need to build a movement, and that’s what we’re hopefully kicking off here.
Jeff: And we see today every movement seems to be to limit voting. The resistance even to mail-in ballots is tremendous. We see this case in Mississippi now that there’s a resistance even to mail-in ballots that are postmarked before Election Day. If the post office has them arrive after Election Day, there’s an argument that they shouldn’t even be counted.
Bradley: Look, it’s interesting. There’s a stat in the book, the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative organization, estimates that 0.000006% of votes cast are fraudulent. So basically the answer is zero. I worked in Chicago politics for four years, didn’t see any examples of voter fraud. It’s not really something that exists in reality. It exists in the imagination of candidates who are afraid of losing and then acknowledging that they actually lost. Obviously, Trump is the biggest example there, but there are people on both sides of the aisle who are guilty of this. And then as they know, they’ve got lots of followers who take whatever they say seriously and then become convinced that this is a real risk.
And then again, we’re in this vicious cycle where, let’s say, Mississippi, a judicial election has turned out of probably less than 10% on the Republican side – those are the most absolutely conservative voters possible – so if you want to get re-elected, the best thing you can do is say yeah, you can buy into all those conspiracy theories. This is true on the left, this is true on the right, on a wide variety of issues. And the only way we’re ever going to get out of this is, you got to change the underlying inputs.
I believe after spending 30 years in and around politics, that pretty much every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else. That was probably true for politicians during the Greek Empire, and the Roman Senate, and any time we’ve ever had a democracy. It’s human nature. It’s okay. Nobody wants to lose their job. So if you want them to act in the public interest, you have to align their political interest with the public’s broader policy interests. And you’re never going to have that when only tiny groups of people are voting. It’s only going to happen if the mainstream of voters are actually participating in elections, and that’s what moves things to the middle.
Jeff: How do we do this if we’re thinking about it in terms of national elections or presidential elections? We do have the issue of geography where people are located, what state they’re voting in, how important that is within the electoral college framework, no matter how bad that might be. Those are real issues that are impacted by people’s ability to vote from wherever they are.
Bradley: Absolutely. So, elections in this country are administered on actually a very local basis. So our ability to make mobile voting possible is going to depend on passing bills in individual states, and cities, and counties, and things like that, so it’s actually not a federal issue. And look, realistically speaking, it’s not going to be the presidential election tomorrow, it’s going to be probably a municipal election. My hope would be that next year I can pass bills in half a dozen cities around the country, where for school board races and city council races we can try mobile voting, and let’s see how it works. If it works well, then let’s expand it to State Rep and State Senate, and then maybe after that Congressional House races. It may be a decade before anyone could vote on their phone in their presidential election.
As I mentioned, ironically the presidential is the one election that actually doesn’t really need mobile voting because actually has pretty good turnout. The problem is every other election that we have, where turnout is abysmal. So my goal is to start local and small, and I think, given a lot of Trump’s craziness, while I’m going to run bills in both blue states and red states, and blue cities and red cities, this may happen faster in Democratic states and jurisdictions. It may be more likely to happen in primaries for general elections, but that’s okay. We got to start somewhere.
Jeff: Is there a danger that given how long it would take, even if this went well in these efforts that you’re engaged in, that given how long it would take, that the technology would change so dramatically during that period of time, that something else may be replacing our phones in the way we communicate with everybody?
Bradley: Sure, and that’s why it’s really important that what we’re building is open source. So, one of the reasons why some of the existing technology was considered by cryptographers to not be sufficient, is these are private companies who have to make a living and therefore their codes is their proprietary information. And they’re not going to make it open source and available to anyone because then they don’t make money. Well, I’ve been running the Mobile Voting Project out of my foundation. I’ve funded it entirely myself, and the reason we’re doing it philanthropically in part is I don’t have to worry about it.
So we are building mobile voting tech that will be open source online so that people can keep improving on it from there, keep adapting it. And even when we do release it, it’s going to be a constant process of improvement and adaptation to make sure the tech is as good as possible. And look, there’s no monopoly on good tech or good ideas. We know from the recommendations in the US Vote Foundation report, that secure mobile voting technology needs to be end-to-end encrypted. It needs to be end-to-end verifiable. It needs to be open source. It needs multifactor authentication, and near generic mapping. It needs biometric screening. We have all of that in what we’re building.
And then as new security measures become available, we’ll incorporate those too, and hopefully what we put out in the world is a starting point for other developers to make it even better.
Jeff: How do you combat among the general public that has been hacked, and has had problems with their banks, and all the things that we hear about all the time? How do you combat the fact that there’s just this fundamental concern about security?
Bradley: Look, first of all, that’s why we keep the other forms of voting available. Some people will choose to avail themselves with this, some people will not. That’s okay either way. By and large though, as a society, we have fully accepted that we can live our lives pretty securely online. Yes, there are hacks, but at the end of the day when I move money around on my Citibank app, or I am communicating with my doctor or whatever else it is, important thing, I’m pretty confident that those things are going to work out okay, and I don’t worry about the risk of being hacked.
Part of it is that we are building technology that we believe is extremely secure and actually much more secure in the ways that we currently vote, but it’s going to take time. The first time that you do anything in a new technology, you’re not quite sure about it. The second time you get a little more confident, by the 10th time you don’t think twice about it, and that’s going to be the case here too. And so what I can do is build the best technology that’s possible in the world we live in today, continue to update it, make it better, show people that it works.
But the most important thing isn’t even really showing people that the tech works. It’s showing people that government can work. So it’s a lot bigger than an app. It’s really about we have a system of government right now that is totally polarized and dysfunctional, because the extremes control everything, and people as a result, don’t have faith or trust in our institutions. They don’t have faith or trust in our government, and they don’t have that because they don’t have any reason to, because what they see is a disaster.
But if you start changing primary turnout to really change the underlying inputs for politicians — Let me give you an example from the book. Chris Jacobs was a Republican Congressman from western New York. Super right-winger, Trump guy, MAGA, all that stuff. But there was a mass shooting in a supermarket in Buffalo, and it was about a mile from his office. And at a press conference after the shooting, he said, “Maybe we ought to do something about gun laws.” The Republican Party line and the Conservative Party line was stripped from him that day. He wasn’t able to run for re-election; his career was over. The reason why is, in a world where the district is gerrymandered, which it was, and primary turnout in his race was about 12%; half of that 12% were NRA members, and they had no interest or tolerance whatsoever for hearing that we might need tighter gun laws, even after a mass shooting that kills some people in the supermarket.
But let’s say that same primary turn out were 36% instead of 12%, the NRA’s vote share goes from 50% down to 16%. Then all of a sudden, if you just look at polling among Republicans, he would have to be for some reasonable gun regulation. Maybe it’s not an assault weapons ban, but something, simply because that’s where most people are. Most people agree on most issues. 70% to 80% of Americans would say, “We just need to confiscate everyone’s guns, nor should it be easy to walk into a store and walk out with an assault rifle. We should neither deport everyone here illegally nor should we have open borders.”
Even abortion, our most controversial issue, the third rail of American politics, two-thirds of Americans agree on the right to an abortion. You can disagree whether it should be 12 weeks or 16 or 24, that’s fine. But even our most controversial issue is actually not that controversial. The problem is, most of the people who agree on most of the stuff don’t actually bother to vote in primaries because it’s too inconvenient for them and too difficult. And so their views are not reflected. Once they start voting in those elections, then all of a sudden, just to stay in office, politicians have to reflect those views, and that’s what gives them the permission, structure, and incentive to start working together.
Jeff: Is there a danger that if we make voting too easy through this process, that we’ll have a situation, not unlike what’s been problematic in California for example, where you get too many initiatives, too many things that people want to directly vote , and you wind up with almost too much democracy, and that becomes problematic at a certain point?
Bradley: Yes, maybe. And right now we’re in a world route where we have not nearly enough democracy, so it sounds like a good problem to have to me. But ultimately it really also just depends on each individual state. So like the California voter initiative system is very liberal and loose, and a lot can get on the ballot, but I live in New York where it’s virtually impossible to put something on the ballot. The state legislature has to pass it two consecutive legislatures in a row, which almost never happens.
And so to a certain extent, that kind of citizen action is going to depend on the laws of each state. But look, I think ultimately most people right now are very disengaged from what their government does, and to a large extent, government gets away. I’ve worked in city government, state government, federal government: government gets away with performing inadequately. Gets away with delivering poor services, and being inefficient and ineffective for the taxes that they take in, because no one’s paying attention. And if people were paying attention and engaged, it would be held to a higher standard, we wouldn’t accept this mediocrity and low performance, and we’d get more for our money.
Jeff: Within the context of the technology, what kind of proof system is there when you have a candidate that loses that then says, “It was rigged. I know it was rigged, somebody hacked the system.” How do we prove that it wasn’t?
Bradley: Yes. So let me walk you through, if it’s okay, how tech works. So let’s take San Francisco because I think that’s where you are. So you download the app from the San Francisco Board of Elections, and then a few things happen. The first thing is they figure out, “Okay, is Jeff a registered voter in San Francisco?” You affirm, yes, you are. They verify your address. Fine. Then the big question is, is Jeff really Jeff? So the first thing is multifactor authentication. So that’s same thing on Google or Amazon where they send a text to your phone and you have to type that in to prove that you’re you.
And then it’s up to the individual restrictions or choices of any jurisdiction, but in some of the deployed military elections we did, we had facial recognition and biometric screening. The app is built to accommodate all of that. And so that we can really determine that the person who says they’re Jeff really is Jeff. So now we’ve determined that you truly are Jeff, the ballot comes up on your screen. And the goal on the ballot is to make it as simple as possible because you want it to be easy to use. But because it’s digital, problems like straight pencil marks or hanging chads or under voting or over voting, all of those go away because that’s not possible in digital ballot.
You make your choices, you double check it, you make sure it’s who you want, you hit submit, and two things happen. One, the ballot is encrypted. Two, you get a tracking number, just like a FedEx package that you can use to track the progress of your ballot. It then goes back to the San Francisco Board of Elections and they take it offline. So now it’s air gap and no longer connected to the internet. They don’t decrypt the ballot until it’s removed from the internet. So it’s not accessible. And then a copy is printed out, it’s put in with the rest of the votes.
You can check the status of your ballots. You can see, okay, it was submitted, received, tabulated, printed, all of that. And then because the code itself is open-sourced, if there was a hacker or any change to it, you’d be able to see that in the source code. And so that’s another way to audit the election itself. And so there’s multiple layers here of both redundancy and accountability. And so if you’re a candidate, you should feel pretty good about this because it’s as far and away the best way to ensure that an election safe.
Jeff: In the pilot programs that have been done, have there been any kind of problems? And if so, what?
Bradley: No. There was one attempt in West Virginia from a server at the University of Michigan to hack the election, and it was detected and stopped. And other than that of the 21 elections we did, National Cybersecurity Center audited all of them, and they all came back clean.
Jeff: What do you think the realistic political chances of doing something like this are? As you indicated before, you’ve been in this business a long time. What do you think, realistically, the possibilities are?
Bradley: So look, the good news is if I do nothing, eventually technology always wins. So, eventually, we will be voting on our phones. The question is, can it be in 3 years or is it going to be 30 years? And the difference is do we want 30 years of polarization or dysfunction, or do we want to get that done a lot faster? And so look, it’s going to have to start small. My hope is if I can get this passed in a handful of cities around the country and we can show that it works, then more people will accept it, more people will want it.
One thing I’ve learned in tech in general is, once the genie’s out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in. So if we can show people, “Hey, there’s a much better way to do something,” ultimately they’ll demand that. That’s why when Denver did that poll, 100% of participants said, “Yes, I prefer voting on my phone to having to go somewhere.” And so my hope is like, let’s just get it going wherever we can and prove that it works and build on it from there. And I think if we do that, eventually, this is how we’ll all be.
Jeff: And finally talk about an issue that people raise. I think that it is unrealistic, but nonetheless, this idea of the communal experience of voting on a particular day.
Bradley: Look, if you want to be able to go to the polling place and vote on Election Day, God bless, go do that. I’m in no way proposing that you shouldn’t be able to do it. But look, in California, in lots of states now people vote by mail already. So whatever that communal experience is, no longer really exists. And let’s give people different options. Some people might say, “I really like this particular tradition.” If so, go do that. But if you’d rather do a mail-in ballot or a digital ballot or whatever it is, the important thing is that you vote. And how you vote doesn’t really matter. It’s that you vote, because by you voting, you’re counted, your voice is heard, and then politicians know they’re going to be held accountable for getting things done. And that’s how things are to change.
Jeff: Bradley Tusk, his book is, Vote With Your Phone. Bradley, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast.
Bradley: Thank you guys so much for having me, Jeff. I really appreciate it.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
