Your idea, essentially, is that we should be able to pick up our mobile device and, the way we nowadays hail a ride or order food, we should be able to vote for political candidates. Why do you think that's the case? It's so important because it's how we live today. And fundamentally, we have a democracy that I think many people would agree just isn't working. It is wildly dysfunctional. It is wildly polarized. I spent the first 15 years of my career working directly in government. And my takeaway from all of it is every policy output is the result of a political input.
Every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else. And because of gerrymandering, the only election that typically matters is the primary – and primary turnout in this country is typically 10-15 percent. And because politicians are just trying to solve for winning the next election, all they do is cater to that small group of voters.
So my base point is, if we meet people where they are and let them vote on their phones, then a lot more people will do it. And if more people do it, then the inputs shift for politicians, and they're far more likely to want to work together and get things done. Pilots have been done in about seven states. What worked and what didn't work? So they were limited pilots. They were either for deployed military or people with disabilities. And the reason we chose those two groups is that they're very politically sympathetic. We wanted to have a mix of red and blue states. Republican states like West Virginia, Utah, South Carolina really liked the idea of making it easier for deployed military to vote. And then liberal states like Oregon or Colorado or Washington really liked the idea of making it easier for people with disabilities to vote.
And here's what we found: Turnout significantly increased, some places more than tripled. The National Cybersecurity Center audited all of the elections and they all came back clean. And the city of Denver did a poll of the people who participated in their election through mobile voting and, not shockingly, 100% said, "Yeah, I like pressing a button more than going somewhere," which, by the way, it would have been weird if they didn't say that, right?
What we also learned, to your point of what didn't work, is that you still have to promote it. This is not “Field of Dreams,” “If you build it, they will come.” And so even once mobile voting hopefully one day is available to everyone, I'm going to need iOS and Android and the social media platforms and everyone to bug people and say, “Hey, today is Election Day,” or ”Early voting starts today. Did you remember to vote? Click here to download the app.” How do you really make these platforms secure so that nobody hacks my vote? So security comes from a combination of, first of all, the different measures to ensure that you're you, like biometric screening and multi-factor authentication. The second would be, it's encrypted, which no other form of voting is. And so immediately, the minute that you cast your ballot, it is completely inaccessible to anyone else. Third is, before it is decrypted, it's taken off of the internet by air gapping. Fourth is, there's a paper copy printed out so you have redundancy there. Fifth is, everything is end-to-end verifiable, so you can track the progress of your ballot. And sixth, and finally, it's all open source, so it's all out there for any cryptographer to see and say, “Yeah, you know, the code works or the code doesn't work.”
Whether it is security or privacy, if the election officials themselves are corrupt, they could violate either of those two things. You know what? That's also true for mail-in voting, in-person voting, and paper ballots. But to be clear, I'm not arguing that mobile voting should replace any form of voting. I'm saying, “Hey, let's make an additional option.” When do you think we could achieve mobile voting? What's your most optimistic timeline and your least optimistic timeline? My most optimistic timeline would be that in maybe 2025, more realistically 2026, you're seeing municipal elections, maybe a handful of state elections. And for the rest of this decade, it's mainly at the state and local level. Then, starting from there, going into House races, maybe Senate races, and maybe by 2032 in the presidential race. So that's sort of the most optimistic.
The most pessimistic is simply, if I never existed, or if I never did anything at all, it's still going to happen. If I did nothing, maybe it's 25 or 30 years. If I do something, maybe it's within the next 10 years. But to me, the difference is a completely broken democracy and society that has to sort of be reorganized so that we can start working together and get things done again. To hear more from Tusk, including why he thinks Gen Z will be the generation to make mobile voting happen, listen to POLITICO Tech on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast player.
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