Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned In Brief. I’m Preet Bharara.

The idea of voting with a smartphone may sound futuristic to some, but my guest today, Bradley Tusk, believes mobile voting might be the key to breaking political deadlock. Bradley is a political strategist, venture capitalist, and philanthropist who started the mobile voting project to make voting more accessible for everyone. He’s the author of the new book, Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting is our Final Shot at Saving Democracy. Bradley, welcome to the show.

Bradley Tusk:

Hey, Preet, thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

So I got a lot of questions for you. I’m going to put to the side for a moment that you are on the record in a volume that has been published in favor of more screen time, but for a good cause. Now, if I understand correctly, you think that our voting process and regime is broken, not only do you say it’s broken, not only do you say it’s very broken, you say it’s very, very broken.

Bradley Tusk:

Very, very broken. We could even throw another very in if you want.

Preet Bharara:

Another very, right? Colossally catastrophically broken. I want to get into why you think it’s broken in a moment, but if I understand correctly, your thesis, your view is if more people voted and it was easier for more people to vote, our system would be less broken and there would be more consensus instead of polarization. Is that basically your thought?

Bradley Tusk:

Yes, absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. So what’s broken?

Bradley Tusk:

Well, what’s broken is if we just accept a few things. The first is every policy output is the result of a political input. So I’ve worked in city government, state government, federal government, executive branch, legislative branch, I’ve run political campaigns. And the thing that I took away from it is pretty much every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else. And that doesn’t make them evil, it just makes them human. They want to keep their jobs. And because of gerrymandering, the only election that typically matters is the primary and primary turnout is usually about 10 to 15%. So who are those voters? They’re the furthest left, they’re the furthest right, or they’re special interests who know how to move money and votes in low turnout elections. As a result, those extreme groups dictate both who wins office and what they do when they’re in office.

And politicians are just going to behave in whatever fashion they need to in order to win their next primary and keep their job. And so when we have really low turnout, that only encourages them to be extreme, that gets it to either the total dysfunction of Washington DC, or one side of government like the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left. And I think if we had meaningfully more people voting the primaries, it would simply move things to the middle. Because the underlying goal is to take primary turnout from 10% up to say 30, 40%. And then all of a sudden the underlying political incentive shifts. So right now, if you are a Republican, you probably know that it’s crazy that someone could walk into a store and walk out with an AK-47.

But you also know that turnout in your primary is 12%, half those people are NRA members, district is gerrymandered so only the primary matters, and if you were to say we should do something about this, you would lose your seat. Or Democrats who probably know that putting the interest of adults in the school system ahead of kids doesn’t really make sense, and the teacher’s union shouldn’t be the priority over kids. But they also know that the UFT in New York or the NEA nationally moves a lot of money in votes in low turnout primaries.

And if they were to oppose the interest of the union, they’re really at risk of losing their next election. And so they sell out the kids in favor of themselves. This happens all the time by both sides. But if we can truly, by math and purely human self-interest, if you had a lot more people voting in that Republican congressional primary, just based on polling of Republicans on gun laws, you’d have different rules. Just based on polling of Democrats on education, you’d have different rules. So we can get to the right policy outputs, but they have to align with the self-interest of politicians.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you to elaborate on a note of optimism that you strike in your book, and that is the idea that notwithstanding how much we’re told we’re polarized, notwithstanding all this harsh rhetoric on one side or the other, and people on the extremes deciding what happens at the ballot box and primaries, as you mentioned, that there’s a lot of overlapping consensus on a lot of issues. There’s a lot of consensus, whether it’s guns or other matters. Can you develop and articulate that optimistic vision of how unified on issues Americans actually are?

Bradley Tusk:

So look, the pessimistic view is kind of what we get in the media every day, which is we are hopelessly polarized and divided and everyone hates everyone. And when you’re talking about the extremes in each side, that’s absolutely true. But when you look at most issues, it’s actually not true. So if you take guns, for example, 70 to 80% of Americans would say, we should either confiscate everyone’s guns, nor should it be easy to buy an assault weapon. Immigration, 70 to 80% of America would say we should either deport everyone who’s here illegally, nor should we have open borders. Even abortion, which is our most controversial issue, the absolute third rail of American politics, two-thirds of Americans would say there should be some right to it. Now you can debate whether it should be 8 weeks or 16 or 24, that’s fine, but even our most controversial issue actually isn’t all that controversial.

The problem is in all of these cases, the people who tend to have reasonable consensus views don’t bother to vote in primaries. They’re busy, they’re taking their kids to school, they’re going to work, they’re living their lives. And I don’t think we can, no matter how important, how many times we say this is the most important election of our lifetime or whatever else, it’s not going to change their behavior. Especially, by the way, in local elections, in primaries. There’s only one election in American politics that really does have sufficient turnout, and that’s the presidential election. So in six weeks, we’re going to see plenty of people voting. It’s the one election that really doesn’t need mobile voting, quite frankly, but everything else is exponentially lower. And that’s why the polarization sets in.

Preet Bharara:

And that’s why sometimes the choice that is available to the public in general elections in the Senate and for governor and certainly for president are not ideal choices. There’s a reason why lots of people were unhappy with the choice of Biden versus Trump. I heard Chris Christie once say something smart. He’s not always saying smart things. Because you don’t get to vote ultimately for who you want. You get to vote for whose left, and a process by which you have people who are more consensus candidates maybe is better. So what about the idea that your argument, and I think it’s a correct diagnosis, argues in favor of nonpartisan primaries?

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah, I mean I think that that would help too. There’s a lot of reforms out there that are worthwhile. Open primaries, ranked choice voting, final five, national popular vote, you name it. And the book does go into all of it. To me though, the gating issue is you still need people currently to show up.

So when you have a voting system that says somebody has to go somewhere, what I don’t think is going to happen is somebody who otherwise wouldn’t vote is now going to make the effort because we have ranked choice voting or we have open primaries. So in New York City where you and I both live, city council primary turnout last year was 7.2%. So in the city of 8.5 million people, I would argue the greatest city in the world, you could win a city council seat with as little as 6 or 7,000 votes in the primary. We need something that will dramatically expand that number. And I think that on its own open primaries or ranked choice voting can’t do that combined with mobile voting and the app that we have built is able to accommodate all the different reforms and be part of it, then you have something really powerful.

Preet Bharara:

I want to get to the phone aspect of this.

Bradley Tusk:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Could you briefly tell the origin story of how you thought about this? You spent some time working for a company called Uber.

Bradley Tusk:

I did.

Preet Bharara:

Which I use quite a bit.

Bradley Tusk:

So I started working with Uber back in early 2011, and we were a tiny little tech startup at the time. We were operating only in San Francisco, and taxi was this big powerful muscular industry. They had lobbyists, they had political contributions, and we were trying to figure out how are we going to counter these guys politically because they certainly didn’t want Uber to ever get off the ground. And what we realized was our customers did really like us, and they really preferred our way of providing people with a ride as opposed to having to go on the street and hope that a taxi passes you by and through the app, over a period of years, we were able to get millions of them to tell their elected officials, their mayors, their city council members, their state representatives, whoever was relevant in that particular jurisdiction, “Hey, I want this Uber thing, leave it alone.” And it worked. We eon in every single market.

Preet Bharara:

Just by pushing a button on the phone, right?

Bradley Tusk:

Yep. That’s all they did. I mean, there were options to tweet or to text or to email or to call. So people chose different ways to do it, but they could do it from the back of an Uber. They could do it in their bathroom, they could do it wherever they were. And the question I started asking myself is, most of these people who are advocating for us, my guess is have no idea who their city council member is. They’ve never voted in a state senate primary. They don’t vote in congressional primaries. But when we made it really easy, they engaged in the process. What if they could vote this way? So that was the initial idea behind the mobile voting project. And then I was up at a TechCrunch Disrupt, which is a big tech conference, and decide to open my big mouth and announce it on the main stage.

So once I’m now publicly boxed in and committed to it, I have to start doing it. There were some early technologies in the space, and in 2018, I met a guy named Mac Warner. Mac is the Secretary of State of West Virginia, and his politics are very different than mine. Mac is a Conservative Republican, he’s a Trumper. But Mac had served in the military, all four of his kids had served in the military, and Mac was very frustrated. The people who were putting their lives in the line to protect our right to vote, by the time they mail on their ballot from Kandahar, it shows up three weeks after the election and it gets tossed in the trash. And he found that deeply offensive, and he was looking for a solution to that. And so we previewed and started doing mobile voting with deployed military from West Virginia.

It worked. Turnout increased. We then expanded it to six other states, both for deployed military and people with disabilities. It kept working, turnout kept increasing. The National Cyber Security Center audited all of the elections, it came back clean. Denver did a poll, people participated, and not shockingly, a hundred percent said, “Yeah, I prefer pressing a button to going somewhere.” And so that’s kind of how we got going. And then when that was all happening, a bunch of cybersecurity experts said, “Listen, the tech that’s out there at the very least is not sufficiently secure. We can’t do this.” And my view from all the years I spent in politics is a lot of people who currently have power, whether it’s elected officials, lobbyists, unions, trade groups, are not going to want mobile voting because they’re not going to want to risk their hold on power, but they also can’t say, “I don’t want more people to vote.” So they’re going to use words like security and integrity as excuses just like we’ve seen in voting rights restrictions in places like Texas and Georgia.

Preet Bharara:

But aren’t some of those people, I would imagine there’s some people who are in good faith concerned about the security issues. There’s someone from the University of South Carolina, I don’t know exactly when this was.

Bradley Tusk:

Duncan Buell. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So can you respond to this thing that he said?

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

“There is a firm consensus in the cybersecurity community that mobile voting on a smartphone is a really stupid idea.” So not very artful. What do you say to that?

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah, I mean, I think Duncan Buell, one, really likes getting quoted in articles. I’m sure he’s ecstatic that we’re mentioning him saying his name right now. And so he knows that if he just says, “I agree.” No one pays attention to him. But even if you put that aside, Duncan and the members of the community that agree with him, and some do and some don’t, just look at it in a vacuum and say, “Is it possible anything could ever go wrong?” Of course it is, and I’ll walk through the security measures that we’ve built. But even with all of those, it’s still possible. But you know what? Things go wrong with paper ballots. Paper ballots is what got us the hanging chads, which got us George W. Bush, which ultimately got us the Iraq war. Vote by mail has problems all the time. Every form of voting has vulnerabilities, and even the bigger concern is leaving the status quo the way it is. So if you were to take Duncan’s suggestion, we’re in a dumpster fire that’s only getting worse.

Preet Bharara:

So what does it look like? Take us into the future as opposed to the present.

Bradley Tusk:

Sure. And the future’s not far away. We’ve been building this thing for four years. We’ll be done with it in 2025. So it’s coming up fast. We have built technology based on the recommendations from the US Vote Foundation that the tech be end-to-end encrypted, end-to-end verifiable, air gap, multi-factor authentication, biometric screening, and most importantly it’s open source. So here’s how it works. So let’s just-

Preet Bharara:

Does that mean by the way that to use this, this is a controversial subject, the requirement of voter ID, would this require ID? It sounds like it would.

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah. Well, so basically the voter ID is the purview of each local jurisdiction that conducts elections. We have built the technology to comport with whatever rules they have. If they’re strict, we can do strict. If they’re not strict, we can do not strict, but personally, when we did this with deployed military, we did a facial recognition scan and then a biometric scan, your fingerprint or your iris, and it worked really well. No one who was supposed to vote had any problems. So I think that’s actually quite a good way to do it.

Preet Bharara:

All right, so you have the app, you have the biometrics, let’s say a jurisdiction, let’s say the state of New Jersey where I grew up decides it wants to do this either as a pilot program or otherwise for state legislature and for the governor. And they call you up and they say, “Bradley, we want to do this.” What do you tell them to do? How does it work?

Bradley Tusk:

So they would take the code, which is open source, and they could do one of two things. They could either adapt it themselves or they could work with an election company that does this stuff, doesn’t matter to us. And then you as the voter or your parents or whoever would go to the New Jersey Board of Elections, they would download the app through the app store. It would identify that, yes, you are a registered voter in New Jersey. Then it would have to show that you are you. And that then depends on a few things. So one is everyone would have multifactor authentication. So that’s like when you get a code texted to you from Amazon or Google, the same thing here. But then on top of that, it’s whatever the jurisdiction has. So if they want to use biometric ID, great. If they want to use digital signature matching, fine.

Once they determine whatever form they choose that you are you, the ballot then comes up on the screen and it looks like every kind of basic internet ballot because the idea is to keep it as simple as possible, but what it prevents are stray pencil marks, hanging chads, over voting, under voting, any of the problems that we typically have with paper ballots or mail-in ballots. Once you check everything and double check it and make sure, yes, this is what I want, you hit submit and two things happen. First is your ballot is immediately encrypted. The second is you get a tracking number so you can follow your ballot’s progress.

Once the ballot is encrypted, it’s sent to the election office, and then they then take it offline and they don’t decrypt it until after it’s been air gapped, which means it’s no longer accessible or attached or hooked up to the internet because the ability for someone to hack you means they have to be able to reach you. So if something is air gapped, they can’t do that. After it is air gapped and decrypted, a paper copy of every ballot is printed out, so you have redundancy and auditability. The voter is able to track the progress through their tracking number. And then because the code is open source, anyone including Duncan Buell, and yet again, I’m saying his name, so he’s excited.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a good thing it’s not a drinking game.

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah, exactly. He’d be wasted by now. Could check the code, and if there are bugs, we’ll know about them and we can deal with it. By the way, I want this to be open source, and one of the reasons why it was necessary for me to build this out of my foundation and do it philanthropically is the private companies doing this by definition, can’t make it open source because it’s their proprietary code and that’s how they make a living. Because I’ve been able to just do all this by giving the money away, I don’t have to worry about that. And so open source is a really critical component of security. So that’s how it works.

Preet Bharara:

And this is a dumb question. I think it was answered a little bit in the response you gave a second ago. So let’s say I vote, [inaudible 00:16:27] voting in this system in New Jersey, and then three days later I’ve either forgotten that I voted because that sometimes happens, or I’m intentionally being mischievous and I try to vote again on the app, or I delete the app and re-download the app and try to vote again. What’s the method by which multiple voting does not happen? Is that the responsibility of the app, your tech, or is that the responsibility of the local jurisdiction?

Bradley Tusk:

It’s our tech because once you have been verified to be you and you have submitted a ballot, you can’t do it again. So it won’t let you revote.

Preet Bharara:

Even from a different phone?

Bradley Tusk:

It doesn’t matter because there’s only one Preet Bharara, only one you that’s been identified.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll say.

Bradley Tusk:

Well, we certainly, there’s only one Preet Bharara.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned veterans and how this is a step-up for people who are serving our country abroad. What are some of the other groups and constituencies in particular would stand to gain in terms of hardship here?

Bradley Tusk:

People with disabilities for sure. In fact, when we did the book launch last night, and in the book itself, there’s an essay from Mark Riccobono. Mark is the president of the National Federation for the Blind. Imagine being blind. I mean, voting is enough of a pain for all of us that we just basically don’t do it most of the time. You’re blind. You’ve got to get there. You’ve got to deal with all the physical process, and then you have to hope that the person that you told them you want to vote for is who they actually mark down, right? Because you can’t even see it, right? So it is totally an indignity to have to vote this way.

Preet Bharara:

So, I’m sorry. So a blind person, the person who’s blind, with this technology, is there an audio component? Is that how?

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah, there is. And all of the, so we’ve been building this literally with participation from the National Federation for the Blind. So all the accessibility features that are useful for the disability community have been built into the app, and they have been part of our testing group throughout. College students. I dropped off my daughter at college a couple of weeks ago, and what I noticed was they gave her a room key, they gave her a bike room key, what never once came up was a mail room key, a mailbox key or mail at all. Right? And I got a text from her yesterday saying, how do I get a ballot? And the reality is, it’s probably not going to happen. But I know that since you and I started this conversation, she’s checked her phone 43 times, and if she could vote on her phone, she would.

So I think generally, Gen Z, people in climate emergencies. If it’s a hurricane and you’ve got to leave your home, you certainly can’t vote. People of color. So there is a lot of voter suppression in this country. One of the essays in the book is Martin Luther King III. He and I are doing an event in Atlanta next week together at the Carter Presidential Library about mobile voting. And the reason he’s a big supporter of it is he sees mobile voting as the best anti-voter suppression tool out there. Because if you’re sitting in your living room and you’re pressing a button on your phone, no one knows the color of your finger, so they can’t turn you away on the basis of your skin. So people in tribal communities, there’s lots of different groups.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to ask you about a couple of other aspects of voting that are important to people. One is the speed of the count, I’m imagining, but I want you to confirm that if you had a system like this in place, locality-wide, statewide in New Jersey or whatever the other jurisdiction is that we’re talking about, that the count is fast. Is that true?

Bradley Tusk:

It is if that’s what they want to use. So we have built this in two ways. One would be to not do the tabulation through the app itself and let that be done by hand and the way they traditionally do it, if they wanted-

Preet Bharara:

[inaudible 00:19:50] after the confirming paper ballot is produced? Okay.

Bradley Tusk:

Or it could obviously tabulate it very, very quickly.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I guess you could do both, right?

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah. You could check one gets the other. Yeah, absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

And another aspect of this, so there’s the hacking concern in which there’s an issue of Russians or other folks who are engaged in malfeasance changing the results. There’s also the question of the sanctity of the anonymity of the voter.

Bradley Tusk:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

Concerns there, or no?

Bradley Tusk:

Well, here’s how it works. It’s exactly like mail-in voting, which is, so when you mail in your ballot, it has identifying marks on there. It has your signature affidavit, it might have your return address, whatever it is. Once the ballot is taken out of the envelope, it’s completely anonymous. There’s no identifying marks on there at all. That’s what’s ultimately counted and kept. Same thing here. So once your ballot is decrypted, all identifying marks go away. And it is just sort of like a paper ballot or a mail-in ballot. It’s mixed in with all of the other ballots, and there’s no way to know whose ballot it is. So it’s just as private as any other form of voting.

Preet Bharara:

Who were the constituencies who were supportive of this? Are there civil rights organizations that appreciate the point you made before about discrimination or others?

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah, absolutely. So Martin Luther King III and the Drum Major Institute is a big supporter of ours. The National Federation for the Blind is a big supporter of ours. Blue Star Families, which is a military organization, is a big supporter of ours. David Hogue who was the kid in the Parkland shooting who kind of emerged from it and started a Gen Z advocacy group, he wrote the foreword for the book. They’re big supporters. Gen Z for Change are big supporters. So people in all of these different communities, and a lot of people in the election reform community as well. So Rod Richey, who started FairVote, Catherine Gale, who started Final Five. So we’ve got a pretty big group of advisors and [inaudible 00:21:40]

Preet Bharara:

Any elected officials?

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah, well, Congressman, Josh Gottheimer for sure has a [inaudible 00:21:45] in the book. Two secretaries of state, both who were elected, were at the book launch last night. Cisco Aguilar, who’s a Democrat from Nevada, he’s their Secretary of State. Mac Warner is Republican from West Virginia. He’s their Secretary of State. There were elected officials at the book launch last night.

And so yeah, we definitely have it. At the same time, the reason I wrote the book is I’ve been around politics too long to expect the people in charge to just say, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. There’s a problem. Let’s fix it even though it’s not good for me.” If they were willing to do things that were not good for them, they would defy the voters and do whatever they thought was right in the first place. They don’t do that. And so there’s going to be a lot of opposition from the status quo, and it’s going to take a movement of people to stand up and demand this to overcome that. And look, it’s going to be hard, but if you look at every major movement that’s been successful in American history, whether it’s civil rights or the women’s right to vote, or same-sex marriage or anything else, the status quo never wanted to grant those rights or privileges. It’s that enough people demanded it anyway that eventually we broke through, and that’s what we’ve got to do here as well.

Preet Bharara:

So what are the next steps and what is realistically the timetable, if any, for this being introduced in various places?

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah, so the next steps for 2025, it’s one, finish the technology. We’re going to put it out in the world. It’ll be places like DEFCON. We’re going to give it to groups like the National Institute for Standards and Technology for their review. Once everything is good, we’re going to put it up online and make it open source. Two, we’re going to start running legislation. We haven’t determined which cities yet, but in municipalities so that we can start small.

So what we’d like to do is start with mobile voting in school board elections, city council elections. Let’s start with municipal. Then maybe we can go to state and then eventually to federal. So look, this is probably a process over the next 8 to 10 years. I don’t think it’s all going to happen overnight, but my hope would be that we can get city and state government and primaries done in the next few years. And the truth is, as you know from the different roles you’ve played in government, most governance actually happens at the state and local level. So even if we can just do that, we would make things so much better.

Preet Bharara:

Are there particular places that are more hospitable to being open-minded? For example, Oregon has had vote by mail for a long time. Is that a particular target or?

Bradley Tusk:

Yeah, in fact, I did an event on mobile voting the other day, and Phil Kiesling, who’s Secretary of State in Oregon had joined it and we had a nice conversation. So yeah, there are places that are more [inaudible 00:24:15] to reform. Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Alaska, actually. There are also places, for example, that are majority minority cities like Atlanta or Miami where because of the civil rights aspect, the voter suppression aspect, we think that there might be a really strong constituency there as well. And there are also places that have a strong military bend. So like Colorado Springs, for example, Colorado is very pro-reform. The Air Force is based in Colorado Springs. It’s a pretty Republican town, but I think people there really appreciate how hard it is for people in the military to vote. And so we think that’s interesting. So for a variety of reasons, different place make sense.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned all these places. What about what you called and what I agree with as the greatest city on earth, our hometown, New York City?

Bradley Tusk:

So I would love to see it happen. I have had conversations with our mayor about it. He’s actually really great on technology issues, and he’s supportive of it as well. But as you know from your years of investigating Albany, they are not hospitable to reform or change of any kind. And so while to me, New York matters more than anywhere else, I think we’re going to have a tougher road here. And given how expensive it is to run campaigns in New York, I think our money is best [inaudible 00:25:29] elsewhere so far.

Preet Bharara:

Makes sense. Bradley Tusk, congratulations on the book. Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting is our final shot at Saving Democracy. Thanks so much for being on the show and good luck.

Bradley Tusk:

Preet, thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

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If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on threads, or you can call and leave me a message at (669) 247-7338. That (669) 24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The Deputy Editor is Celine Rohr. The Editorial Producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.