How mobile voting can save democracy

BRADLEY TUSK: If the status quo is working for you, you don’t want mobile voting because all that does is introduce an element of risk, right?

Depending on what happens in a month from now and the results we see, we could have all kinds of civil unrest, violence, and bloodshed contesting the results of an election, and that’s crazy, right? We’re going to take the country, which is the most successful governmental experiment, the most successful economy in the history of the world, and let it all fall apart simply because we don’t want to make voting easier. That’s crazy.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Bradley Tusk, early Uber adviser, former deputy governor of Illinois, and an outspoken advocate for casting our votes via our smartphones. As we head toward November 5th, there is much attention and anxiety about the safety and security of the U.S. election. Tusk argues that those concerns obscure a larger point: it is the business of politics and the business of elections that is disrupting American democracy. The solution, he argues, won’t come from the presidential race but from remaking the mechanics of American democracy. And that beeping, buzzing, TikToking device in our pockets can make that happen in a way that nothing else can. Whether you’re intrigued or skeptical about Tusk’s perspective, how he’s put his Uber-based fortune into the cause is thought-provoking — as is his dismissive position on ESG, his embrace of effective altruism, and more. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Bradley Tusk, a political strategist, CEO of Tusk Ventures, and a fellow podcast host of the show Firewall. Bradley, thanks for joining us.

TUSK: Yeah, Bob, thanks so much for having me.

Copy LinkThe urgency of mobile voting

SAFIAN: So, you’re joining in the final stages of what many have called the most momentous election in a generation.

There’s uncertainty around misinformation, disinformation, and polling data. No one knows what to trust. And into all of this, you published a book called “Vote with Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy.” Now, I would say that some might argue that now is exactly the wrong time to talk about voting by phone if you want to save democracy because there’s already so much drama around voting fraud. Why now?

TUSK: There’s only one election in the U.S. that really does not need higher turnout in mobile voting, and that’s the presidential election. For example, you and I are both in New York City. Do you know what city council primary turnout was last year here?

It was 7.2%, right? You could win a council seat in New York with 7,000 votes in a city of eight and a half million people.

I was Mike Bloomberg’s campaign manager. He ran for mayor of New York. I worked for him at City Hall. I was the deputy governor of Illinois for four years. I was in Washington in the Senate as Chuck Schumer’s communications director. So I’ve kind of seen this from every angle, and I took one basic thing away from it: every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else.

And are there a few exceptions here or there like Bloomberg? Sure, but they’re exceptions. And because of gerrymandering, the only election that ever really matters is the primary. Primary turnout in this country is typically 10 to 15 percent, and who are those people? They’re the furthest left, they’re the furthest right. And that gets us one of two types of government: either the total dysfunction of Washington, D.C. where nothing can get done, or a totally one-sided government. Whether that’s the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left, I would argue that none of that is good. And until we have an environment where more than just the ideologues are voting, politicians are never going to have the incentive to work together and compromise. And we’re never going to solve our problems. Honestly, if we don’t find a way to radically fix this in the next couple of years, we’re probably not even one country in 25 years.

Copy LinkWhy people in power don’t want mobile voting

SAFIAN: I have been personally intrigued by the idea of voting by phone for years. I figure if I can securely access my bank account and move money around, why shouldn’t I be able to vote? But every time I bring it up with people in the know, political insiders, it kind of gets pushed away as being not safe.

TUSK: It’s not good for them. If the status quo is working for you, you don’t want mobile voting because all that does is introduce an element of risk, right? Right now, you know how to win an election with 10 percent primary turnout. If we’re going to get it up to 30 percent primary turnout, that could go badly for you. And so, yeah, political insiders are always going to say that.

When they pass restrictions in Texas or Georgia to make it much harder to vote, they don’t say we want to make it harder to vote. They say security, integrity.

The Heritage Foundation, which is a really conservative think tank, found that the percentage of votes cast that are fraudulent is 0.0000006 percent. I worked in Chicago politics. That is as ugly as it gets. Guess what? I never saw, never heard of, and not a single person ever brought up once voter fraud. It is not an actual thing.

The reason why I built my own mobile voting app is because I knew that for as long as the people who were in power had the excuse of using security to not do it, that’s exactly what would happen. We have built tech that uses end-to-end encryption, is end-to-end verifiable, has multifactor authentication, biometric screening, and air gapping. It’s open source, and I’ve spent about $20 million of my own money in total on the mobile voting project. And the reason why we’ve done all of that is that otherwise, they would use the security excuse to never change anything.

SAFIAN: But not everyone wants more people voting.

TUSK: Oh, most people in power don’t want more people voting.

When I was running all the campaigns to legalize Uber around the country, we were this tiny little tech start-up, and taxi was this really big industry. But through the app, people were able to tell their elected officials, “Hey, I like this thing, please leave it alone.” And over a period of years, millions of people did, and that’s how we won every single market in the country. These same people didn’t know who their city council member was; they weren’t voting in state Senate primaries. They just knew that they liked this Uber thing a lot better than going in the street and hoping to find a taxi. And if all they had to do was press a button from the app to tell the mayor, “Hey, leave it alone,” they would do so, and my question was, would they vote this way? So the first phase of the mobile voting project was we funded elections in seven different states where either deployed military or people with disabilities voted in real elections on their phones. Turnout was limited to sample groups, but went way up in those groups because like everything in tech, when you reduce the friction considerably, people use it.

So that’s why I built the app. You’re right, I’m going to get opposition all over the place, and the only way to overcome it is to do exactly what happened with Uber, which is to get millions and millions of real people to say, “Hey, I demand the right to do it,” and that’s how we win. If we were so divided as a country that we literally just couldn’t agree on anything, then you could say this is pointless and hopeless, but we’re not. 70 to 80 percent of Americans would say we should neither confiscate everyone’s guns nor should it be easy to walk into a store and walk out with an assault rifle. The problem is those people don’t vote in primaries, so their views are not reflected. Immigration? 70 to 80 percent of Americans would say we should neither deport everyone who’s here illegally nor should we have open borders. They don’t vote in primaries, so their views don’t matter. Even abortion, right, the third rail of American politics? Two-thirds of people agree that there should be a right to abortion. The problem is that the people who actually vote in the only elections that matter, which are primaries, are ideologues, and they don’t agree. And so this is actually a solvable problem, but it’s only going to get solved if you reduce all the friction and make voting a lot easier.

Copy LinkHow mobile voting technology ensures security

SAFIAN: So can you talk me through how mobile voting works in a way that would make me comfortable about it?

Like, is it relying on blockchain? Do you track votes?

TUSK: You’re Bob. You live in King County, New York. You say, okay, I want to vote on my phone. You search for the New York City Board of Elections app. You download it. The first thing they say is, okay, is Bob really a voter in the city of New York? They establish, yes, Bob is a resident of this address. He’s a voter here.

But the next question is, are you really you? So the first thing we do is multifactor authentication. So just like when you forget your password at Amazon or Google or whatever else, you have to send a text to your phone. You have to put that back into the website, same thing here.

Then there’s biometric screening to make sure that you’re really Bob. So they’re taking a facial recognition scan of your face and saying, okay, does this match up with his driver’s license or his ID or whatever it is? So once you’ve done both the multifactor authentication and the facial recognition scan, the ballot comes up on your phone.

So, you make all your choices, you go back, you double-check it, triple-check it, whatever you want. You hit submit, and two things happen. The first thing is your ballot is immediately encrypted. The second thing is you get a tracking number, like you would for a FedEx package. Like, okay, this is the tracking number for Bob’s ballot.

Then the ballot goes back to the New York City Board of Elections, and the first thing they do is air gapping. They take it offline, so now it’s no longer connected to the internet. A paper copy is automatically printed out. It’s then mixed in with all the other ballots — mail-in, paper, and in-person, everything else. You can use the tracking number to say, okay, my ballot was submitted, received, printed, whatever.

So that’s how we do it. It’s not over blockchain. It’s done over AWS. We’re using the same system that the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, NASA, and the FBI use.

I think what we have is exponentially more secure than any other form of voting.

SAFIAN: And my personal vote, like I can track it, but my vote can’t be tracked back to me.

TUSK: When the ballot is decrypted and printed, it’s just the ballot with the choices, but nothing to identify that you’re you.

Copy LinkThe cost of implementing mobile voting

SAFIAN: So you say you put close to $20 million behind these efforts, and $20 million is a lot of money, but it’s tiny compared to what a bad actor or a rogue nation-state might devote to compromising a U.S. election. I do my banking on my mobile phone because the financial industry spends billions securing that. So how much would it cost really to make an airtight mobile voting system?

TUSK: Yeah. So look, this is why the code is open source, right? This is not meant to be version 1, and there’s never a version 57 and so on, right? Someone had to do the first thing, right? And I decided that if I didn’t do it, probably nobody would. And so I did it.

We’ve met with DARPA and others to see if they can sort of take the project from here. But, too, that’s why I want to start really small — school board races, city council races. So could Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un try to disrupt an election? Yes, they absolutely could try to. Do I think that they’re really trying to disrupt the Brooklyn Borough President election? No. And so let’s start small and see how it goes. And then if it’s working, we can go to state elections. If that’s working, we can start moving to congressional primaries, and we can do primaries before general and state and local before federal. So, you know, the elections that I’m worried about are not the really big high-profile ones where foreign policy is determined by the people standing up for election. I’m worried about state reps, state Senate, city council — 70 to 80 percent of the governance that actually impacts your life on a day-to-day basis. That has nothing to do with Washington, D.C. Like that’s where your life is actually impacted.

SAFIAN: But it sounds like this transition, as you describe it, this is going to take a long time.

TUSK: A, this is a 10-year process, at least.

Copy LinkSupport from different constituencies for mobile voting

SAFIAN: Yeah. And when you go to talk to, as I imagine you have to, jurisdictions about expanding the pilot program, like what are the responses?

TUSK: It depends on the election official, right? You either get people like Mac Warner, who was the very first election official in the country to do mobile voting. Mac is the Secretary of State of West Virginia. Mac was in the military. All four of his kids served in the military, and he found it unbelievably frustrating and offensive that you’re risking your life to protect our right to vote, and then you mail in your ballot from Kandahar, and it shows up three weeks after the election and goes in the trash.

Mark Riccobono, the president of the National Federation for the Blind, is a big supporter.

Martin Luther King III is a big supporter; he sees mobile voting as the best anti-voter suppression tool out there. If you’re sitting in your living room, pressing the button, no one knows what color your finger is, right?

You’ve got lots of different groups already. So Military, people with disabilities, civil rights, think about people in North Carolina right now whose homes have been destroyed. How are they going to vote?

But the bigger problem isn’t even individual constituencies; it’s just what low turnout means.

This is a math equation. The only people voting are the extremes. You only need extreme outcomes. If you can move things to the middle, you’re going to get a lot more mainstream politicians. And that’s only going to happen if you reduce the friction of it. And so if you believe that we can do it securely, there’s no reason not to do this.

Copy LinkIs mobile voting inevitable?

SAFIAN: When you look at the demographics of voters and the fact that younger people rely on their phones and trust their phones in a different kind of way, do you think that voting by phone is inevitable?

TUSK: Look, if I did nothing, eventually, 25 years, 30 years, at some point, sure, it’ll happen anyway. But the difference is, I think that if we were to wait that long and just let it take its own course. Look, depending on what happens in a month from now, we could have all kinds of civil unrest, violence, and bloodshed contesting the results of an election in four weeks.

The country is in such dangerous shape right now that if you said, we’re just going to kind of let things unfold, the natural solution ultimately is a national breakup, right? And that’s crazy, right? We’re going to take the country that is the most successful country, the most successful governmental experiment, the most successful economy in the history of the world, and let it all fall apart simply because we don’t want to make voting easier. That’s crazy.

SAFIAN: I find it refreshing that somebody is taking mobile voting in the U.S seriously because I do think it’s inevitable. The assumption that the technology can’t be safe and trusted never made sense to me. Now, will Tusk’s product catch on enough to bring voting to the masses? We’ll dig into that after the break.

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Before the break, Bradley Tusk of Tusk Ventures talked about how he believes voting by phone can save American democracy. Now we talk about building a movement around mobile voting and the role that business might play. Plus why he believes in effective altruism despite Sam Bankman-Fried’s connection to it, and more. Let’s jump back in.

When you look to build a movement around this idea, to what extent is the business community and business leaders allies of yours in this? I mean, we’ve seen business leaders become more wary about taking public positions on political and social issues with a few notable exceptions.

Copy LinkThe role business might play in mobile voting

TUSK: Yeah, but… What business leaders want in my experience are two things. They want the best tax and regulatory climate they can get. But then they also want where they live and work and where their employees live and work to be clean, safe, well-run, with good schools and affordable housing and all of that.

SAFIAN: They want the environment to be stable. They’re the disruptors, but they…

TUSK: Correct. And the way you get a stable environment is by having centrist politicians. And the way you get centrist politicians is by having centrist electorates and voters.

Look, another reason I wrote this book was to build a movement, but also to get other people to start funding this thing with me because I have self-funded this completely, and I’m glad that I’ve been able to do it. But I’m not that rich. And a lot of people are a lot richer than me.

And I would like them to support what I’m doing.

Copy LinkIncreasing demand for mobile voting

SAFIAN: I mean, it just seems like technologically, I’m not saying that it was simple what you’ve built, but it doesn’t sound like it’s that complicated. The issue really is sort of public perception and lack of demand for this product.

TUSK: The lack of demand is interestingly why we tested some of the technologies with deployed military and people with disabilities to see, okay, what would happen when the actual supply was there? And the answer was, turnout went way up. So the demand is there if people know about it, right? But they have to know about it. And like I said, I don’t think most people are really engaging in thinking deeply about politics one way or another, right? You know, we still have people who are undecided on this presidential election. There’s four weeks to go, and Donald Trump’s been in our lives for 10 years now in this way.

So I don’t expect them to until it becomes a reality in their lives or at least a possibility in their lives.

Copy LinkThe state of business leadership in 2024

SAFIAN: You have a cynical, clear-eyed, I dunno, view of political leaders. What do you think the state of business leadership is right now?

TUSK: I mean, I think that generally speaking, all things being equal, human beings would default towards doing the right thing and doing the good thing. But I think people are generally pretty self-interested. We look at why universities fell apart in the wake of today’s October 7th, 2024, such as the one year anniversary. Why did universities fall apart in the last year? Because if you’re a university president and the only people that you’re answerable to in order to get your next contract is an extremely progressive faculty, then all of a sudden, all the decisions you’re making are driven by appeasing that very small, ideological group of people.

If you are a business leader, who are you trying to appease? Your shareholders, the board, maybe employees. If you think there’s a real risk of losing them if you don’t do so, everyone has their stakeholders.

And so I don’t think business leaders, political leaders, academic leaders, or most people are really all that different, which is they want their lives to go as smoothly as possible. They want to sort of satisfy their goals and ambitions. And they’re going to do whatever allows them to do that. And I think that’s true across the board.

SAFIAN: There was a moment maybe when business leaders were talking about higher-level issues than just shareholder value, perhaps…

And that they were trying to figure out…

TUSK: Narrative. That was a media moment and narrative.

Copy LinkRethinking the purpose of wealth and philanthropy

As soon as they didn’t have to, as soon as they sant to do it. Look, I, now I’ll say more. So I don’t believe in ESG, for example. I think it’s the worst of both worlds. I think it ends up being really bad investing and really bad kind of corporate programs. For example, I’m a Mets season ticket holder, and Citi has a sign that they give $2,000 for every home run hit at Citi Field to No Kid Hungry. So it amounts to like $200,000 a year or something like that. Very, very little. And the other thing I do in my foundation is hunger. I’ve spent about $7 million of my own money on it. And I don’t waste money putting up a sign at Citi Field. I use the money to help kids, right? Why is Citi doing it? All things being equal, sure, they prefer the kids not starve. But basically, they said, “Oh, we’re in a world now where looking like we have a broader mission is important. And therefore, we’re going to do this marketing thing effectively, right?” So look, to me, even though Sam Bankman-Fried was a fraud, the underlying premise of effective altruism, which is make as much money as you can and then give it away, to me is right.

There are things that I don’t invest in because I don’t believe in them. I don’t invest in guns. I don’t invest in tobacco. I don’t invest in oil. But other than that, I try to make as much money as I can for my LPs. I try to make as much money as I can for me and my partners, and then I give away more than half of the money that I make.

Whether it’s mobile voting, or the stuff we do about hunger, or I mentioned before we started the show, I own a bookstore and podcast studio that loses incredible amounts of money every year. I found that selfishly, when I do things with my money that make me feel good about myself, the ROI to me personally is higher than when I buy stuff.

And so just in trying to develop the highest possible ROI for myself, if my choice is owning a bookstore that is a place where people can go and hang out, and we have authors every night, and we’re the only free podcast studio in New York, and we employ 10 people, and every time I walk in there, someone pats me on the back and tells me how wonderful I am because they know I lose all this money owning a bookstore and that validates my ego — that does more for me than flying private. I lose about the same amount of money to run the bookstore that it would cost if I flew private instead of commercial. I would argue that most rich people listening to this podcast are wildly uncreative in how they think about the ROI for the money they spend, and they just sort of check the boxes they think they’re supposed to check.

And oftentimes, that’s the hedonic treadmill, right? You buy something, and then the next thing you have to buy is even more expensive, and the amount of dopamine hit wears off even faster, and it gets worse and worse every single time. That’s why people end up with 600 million yachts. And so the reality is…

Most people, I think, if they chose to use their money to have some sort of tangible societal benefit, would generate more personal benefit from it than elsewhere. And so, to me, that’s why that underlying notion of effective altruism is actually a lot smarter than sort of ESG. And I think what you’re talking about, which is when the Business Roundtable kind of redefined the mission of the corporation and everything else, ultimately wasn’t all that genuine, and you’re seeing people back away from it now as fast as they can.

SAFIAN: And you said like you won’t invest in guns or in oil or in certain areas, but otherwise, what the business does, the business having some other higher mission beyond just making money, you don’t really care about?

TUSK: I don’t, I don’t. And by the way, I will invest in a business with negative externalities. So, for example, I was an investor in FanDuel, right? And we ran all the campaigns to legalize daily fantasy sports betting all over the U.S. There are people who believe that gambling is a sin or societal evil and would say that what I did there was wrong. I don’t agree. I think that gambling has always existed. It’s just a question of whether it’s legalized, regulated, and taxed, or done by bookies. But yeah, I have a foundation. I volunteer at a soup kitchen every Thursday morning, which I fund as well. I give away most of my money, and I get my self-worth out of doing those things, not from making these investments that sound good but ultimately don’t really change anything.

So I think we just have to be willing to, look, whether it’s voting or how we fund social services or philanthropy or anything else, we have to take a step back and sort of ask what’s working, what’s not working, what’s the best solution here independent of what you think you’re supposed to do or the need for status or accolades or anything else. What will yield the best outcome? That’s what we should pursue, right?

In venture all the time, we see funds that fail and startups that fail because they’re just chasing a trend. “Oh, I’m doing AI right now.” I invest very rarely in AI because I’m not going to put in a term sheet at a $100 million valuation for a Series A company that has $2 million in revenue, right? It may sound cool, but that’s not going to return my fund. And it’s not going to make money for ILPs. We chase the thing that we’re supposed to do instead of thinking like, what will yield the most actual benefit in return?

And I think if we were willing to be more independent thinkers, I think we would be a lot better off.

Copy LinkWhere the United States is failing

SAFIAN: When you look at where we are in the United States now, currently, are you optimistic about where we sit right now?

TUSK: Statistically speaking, the world is in the best shape it’s ever been exponentially, right? Billions of people in the last 50 years have been lifted out of extreme poverty. Life expectancy rates are much longer. Infant mortality is much lower. Literacy is much higher. The world as a whole is the best it’s ever been. More people have rights and freedoms and everything else.

And why I think that in this country, we agree on most issues and we have still the best underlying economic sort of thesis and innovation and everything else. When we have such a failed system of government at every single level, it derails all that progress. And so I think that we can continue to be the most successful country in the history of the world, but when you look at, for example, I don’t know if you read the 2023 World Happiness Report, but the U.S. was 23rd overall. For people under the age of 30, we were 68th. So the richest, most successful country in the history of the world was 68th for people under 30. That is because something is fundamentally broken. And I think part of it is our system of government. And part of it is, I think, a lack of purpose.

And you can’t get that through money and stuff. You only get that by doing things that are actually meaningful. And I would say that our society still has more potential than any other in the world, but in terms of what matters in life, it has gotten away from us. In terms of having a functional democracy, it has gotten away from us. And I think we have to take some really radical steps to fix it.

SAFIAN: Well, Bradley, this has been bracing. Thank you for…

TUSK: Yeah, no, no. Thanks for having me on and letting me rant and rave about all these different things.

I appreciate the chance to come on and make my case.