Bradley Tusk wants you to vote with your cell phone.
But in a moment when nearly half of voters are not confident that U.S. election systems are secure from hacking and other tech threats, is voting by phone really ready for prime time?
Tusk, a lobbyist, political strategist, and venture capitalist, remains bullish. His new book, Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy, contends that making it easier for people to vote will increase turnout and help move our politics toward the center.
“I really do believe that this is our single best shot at solving the polarization problem,” he says. “The only way to fix it is to radically increase participation. To do that, you have to be able to take advantage of the technology that we already use in our banking, our health care, our love lives, and everything else.”
A former staffer for Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Tusk has made the development of app-based voting technology a main focus of his philanthropy.
He became wealthy after serving as Uber’s first political advisor, leading the startup’s successful fight against taxi monopolies. The company paid him in equity estimated to be worth $100 million, some of which he has put towards Tusk Philanthropies. Since 2017, he has directed $20 million toward charitable and lobbying efforts to make mobile voting a reality.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why mobile voting?
Most of the time the election that really matters is the primary. But primary turnout is typically about 10 to 15 percent. And who are those voters? They’re the far left. They’re the far right. Or they’re special interests. Those groups dictate not just who wins office, but what those people can do once they’re in office. That gets you either a completely dysfunctional, polarized government, like Washington, D.C., where nothing can get done, or totally one-sided government, like the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left.
We have common ground where we could have solutions on almost every single public policy issue. But as long as politicians are held hostage by the extremes and by special interests, they’re never going to be able to do that.
When I ran the campaigns to legalize Uber, we said to our customers, ‘We need you to tell your local elected officials if you like this experience and want to keep using it.’ Through the app, we were able to mobilize millions of people over a period of a couple of years. We just made it really easy, and they did it. We won everywhere. The question was: If people could vote this way, would they?
How would mobile voting work?
Where do you vote?
I’m in Marin County, California.
You would download the Marin County Board of Elections app, and they would establish if you’re registered to vote there. Then they would send a code to your phone. Then they use biometric screening, like Clear at the airport, to take a face scan. Then a ballot pops up on your screen. You make your choices, and when you decide it’s good to go, you hit submit. The ballot is immediately encrypted, and you get a tracking number, sort of like a FedEx package, where you can follow the progress of your vote. The ballot goes back to the Marin County Board of Elections. The first thing they do is air-gapping, which means they remove it from the internet. They don’t decrypt your ballot until it’s taken offline. Then a paper copy prints out and is mixed in with all the other votes. The code itself is open source. So anyone can go back and check and make sure that everything went smoothly.
You funded mobile voting pilots in seven states. How did that work?
We had to find election officials who really wanted change, had the legal authority to do so without legislation, and were willing to put in all the work to do it. I funded all the costs of administering the election itself. We started off with Mac Warner, who’s secretary of state of West Virginia. Mac is a conservative MAGA Republican. He and all four of his kids have served in the military. He was incredibly frustrated that it was so hard for someone who was literally risking their life to defend our right to vote to cast a ballot. That’s how it started. We ended up doing pilots in seven different states for either deployed military or people with disabilities who were able to vote in real elections on their phones.
Turns out, not surprisingly, when you reduce all the friction and make something available on someone’s phone, a lot more people do it. So turnout on average doubled.
Have these communities continued to use technology?
Some of these jurisdictions are doing it on their own expense because it’s just a better way to administer the election. In King County, which includes Seattle, their conservation district is required to have an election every year. We started doing mobile voting with them, and they increased turnout from 1 to 2 percent to 3 to 5 percent. Just exponentially more people at a fraction of the cost. Other states started doing it as well. It definitely has legs and momentum beyond us.
You started by partnering with other tech companies, but now you’re funding the development of a voting app. Why the pivot?
The private companies who were doing this — Voatz and Democracy Live — the tech that they had might have been perfectly fine. But they were never going to make it open source. The cryptography community argued that if the code was not open source, you could never have any confidence in it.
It was clear to me that it had to be philanthropic. There was no other way to build the underlying tech that would meet the needs of the security community and their demands. For the past four years, we have been building this tech. We’ll finish it next year, and it will be free and open source for anyone that wants to use it.
The latest iteration is called VoteHub. What’s the status of that product now, and what are the next steps for its rollout?
We’re in the final phases. Next year we’ll submit it to DEF CON, the big hacker convention, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Whatever they find that’s problematic, we will fix. Our goal is to have people make it better. Once we go through all of that, we will then make it publicly available to any election jurisdiction that wants it.
The final phase of this whole project, which is why I wrote the book, is to pass laws in basically every city and state around the country to legalize it. That’s going to have to come over the objections of everyone who benefits from the status quo. That starts with running legislation next year in six to 10 cities to authorize mobile voting in municipal elections and then hopefully grow the movement for there.
We’re talking less than a week before Election Day. There’s so much distrust of election integrity, especially on the political right. Would mobile voting make that worse?
Of all the problems in our system, voter fraud is not one of them. It’s not a real thing. It’s a Trump-based creation. With that said, it has become the reality for a lot of people. They’re never going to say they don’t want people to vote. They’re going to say ‘security,’ ‘integrity,’ all the same stuff they say now when they pass restrictions in Texas or Georgia or wherever else. While I want to pursue this in all cities and states, realistically, it may be that this happens in blue cities and states before red [ones]. I’d love to be proven wrong. And just to be clear, we’re not trying to replace any form of voting. We’re trying to give people more options.
Other philanthropists funding voting access and reform have been accused of partisanship. I’m thinking of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan’s $400 million donation to the Center for Tech and Civic Life to help election offices respond to the pandemic. Do you have any concerns that your efforts will be delegitimized by people who say, ‘hey this app is funded by a guy who donates a lot of money to Democrats?’
They’re already saying this. What’s different, aside from the fact that I’m worth a tiny fraction of Mark Zuckerberg, is that I came up in politics. I’m used to being attacked and beat up and criticized. I truly believe that this is the only scalable solution to fixing the polarization problem and fixing our democracy, so I have to be willing to endure what comes with that.
What role do you think private donors should play in our election infrastructure?
Once the tech’s out there, we’ll have de-risked and proven it. There are hopefully a lot of other funders and institutions that will want to partner with me.
We have an opportunity to make it politically feasible for elected officials to work together, to be centrist and to say no to the special interests and say no to the ideological extremes. Until we do that, they will never get anything done.