MILES PARKS, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Miles Parks. As NPR's voting correspondent, I can tell you, President Trump and election experts agree on very few things. But paper ballots are one of them.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's called watermark. It's impossible to copy, impossible to cheat. It's actually hard to believe that a piece of paper is highly sophisticated. But it's watermark, and it's very - it's amazing, actually, when you see it. You can't cheat.
PARKS: Voting officials also say paper ballots give the public a way to double check results using the actual physical votes that were cast. Here's how former New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner put it a few years ago.
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BILL GARDNER: See this pencil here? Want me to give it to you and see if you can hack this pencil? This is how people vote in this state, and you can't hack this pencil.
PARKS: But nearly 80% of Americans don't participate in primary elections. Bradley Tusk is convinced there's a better way. Tusk is a venture capitalist and political strategist who is now hell-bent on making online voting a reality, even at a time when much of the election establishment thinks it's a bad idea. Tusk's organization, the Mobile Voting project, is pushing a major technology makeover for American democracy. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
BRADLEY TUSK: Hey, Miles. Thanks for having me.
PARKS: Yeah, thanks for being here. So you have been pushing for years to move towards holding elections via smartphone. The front page of the Mobile Voting project website says, fix our broken politics, vote with your phone. How would voting with your phone actually change everything?
TUSK: To me, the biggest problem we face in our politics is polarization. It is really hard for our politicians to work together to compromise and solve problems because they are typically answering to the small groups of people who vote in their primaries. Because of gerrymandering, typically the only election that really matters is the primary, and primary turnout is very low. It's usually around 10%, and those voters tend to be the people at the extremes, whether it's the far right or the far left, or very special interests that know how to move money and votes in low turnout elections. And because politicians really want to get reelected above anything else, I mean, order to do so, they have to satisfy that 10% who actually vote in their primaries, which means being completely pure to the ideology rather than working across the aisle to get things done.
If you had higher turnout, that would become a lot easier. If turnout were 30 or 40% in a primary instead of 10, that is so much more representative of the mainstream that the underlying political incentives for our elected officials shift towards working together and getting things done. So I think the only way to change and end the polarization is to have meaningfully higher turnout. And the only way to do that, especially for state and local elections where people just aren't that focused, is to bring voting to where the people are and where they live their lives, and that's on their phone.
PARKS: Do you have any sense of how voters feel about that? I mean, I guess I just wonder about the average American if they would be open to this sort of change.
TUSK: Sure. We've polled this a bunch of times in different places. And what's interesting is before 2020, the results were very consistent across Democrats, independents and Republicans where about 75% said, yes, if it is secure, we should have this. After 2020, we stayed in the mid-70s with independents and Democrats but then fell into the 40s with Republicans because Trump falsely arguing that he was - you know, the election was stolen from him in 2020, but that did resonate with a lot of Republicans. There are individual groups of people for whom voting tends to be harder and they are particularly supportive. So that could be people in rural areas, deployed military, people with disabilities, Gen Z. We have a lot of support in the civil rights community because a lot of the leaders think that mobile voting is the best anti-voter suppression tool out there. So there are specific groups of people.
But overall, you know, I ask groups, like, hey, who voted in their last state Senate primary? If they're being honest, almost no one raises their hands. And then when I say, OK, if you could do it while you're waiting for your coffee or you're sitting on the bus or whatever it is, how many of you would then consider doing it? And then pretty much everyone raises their hands. So even if we went from 10% turnout to 35, it would radically change the composition of the electorate and the underlying political incentives. And so I think that that's very feasible in a world where we already do our banking on our phones, or health care on our phones. I just think we're so used to it that it wouldn't be a hard transition.
PARKS: Can I just ask how much money have you put into, at this point, this project?
TUSK: I've put over $20 million of my own money into this so far.
PARKS: Wow.
TUSK: I should be clear this is totally philanthropic. This is not in any way, shape or form a business. I'm spending it to hopefully try to fix democracy. One other point that I just should make just in case it's not clear, mobile voting is not meant to replace any form of voting. We should just have every form available possible. And yeah, in 20 years, could it be that, you know, mobile voting is basically what everyone uses? Sure.
PARKS: Well, and I think - when you were talking about the polling that you all have done on this, I think the key phrase is, if it's secure, if people feel like it's secure, right? I know that you guys just announced a pretty major development or something that you guys are calling a milestone in internet voting technology. Can you explain this new thing that you rolled out?
TUSK: Yeah, absolutely. And to be clear, if it's not secure, of course we shouldn't have it. I wouldn't want it either. So the way it works is - I'll use myself as the example here. I download the New York City Board of Elections app. The first thing they would say is, OK, is there someone named Bradley Tusk who lives in New York City? I would enter the last four digits of my social and my address, and now we've established, OK, there is a voter named Bradley Tusk in New York City, but am I Bradley Tusk? So the first thing is multifactor authentication. So that's just like when you forget your Google password, they send you a code, you put it into the app. The second thing is biometric screening, so take a scan of your face. Now we've established I'm really me. The ballot appears on my screen.
Whenever I'm done and I'm ready to submit, three things happen. First, my ballot is encrypted. Second, it's anonymized. And third, I get a tracking code, like if it were a FedEx package. It then goes back to the Board of Elections, and they air gap it, which means they just take it offline. And once my ballot is not connected to the internet, then they decrypt it. A paper copy of my ballot gets printed out. That gets mixed in with all the other ballots, and that's what's scanned and tabulated. I can see where my ballot stands because the tracking code will show me that it was received, printed, tabulated and so on, and so you can have confidence in the results.
PARKS: I know you all did work with a company, Free & Fair, who's considered a credible election technology vendor. But I did talk this week with Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton University. He's part of this group of computer scientists and experts who I think you're familiar with.
TUSK: Sure, of course.
PARKS: These are people who have been pretty skeptical of your work for years. And what he told us was that what the project published essentially does not actually prove everything that this thing is ready for prime time any more than any other previous time. Let's just listen to a little bit of this.
ANDREW APPEL: The report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (ph) published in 2018 - and I was one of the coauthors of that report - said that as of 2018, internet voting was not securable by any currently known technology. Didn't say it would never, ever be possible. It's still true in 2025 that there's no currently known technology that will do it.
PARKS: So he read everything that you all have published. He wrote a blog post laying out a bunch of issues that he saw with it. Have you seen the blog post and do you have any response to that?
TUSK: I have, and I just think he got a lot of it wrong. He pointed out three specific areas where he thought the technology fell short. The first was ballot checks, and that is voters going back and looking at a PDF of their ballot to ensure that it's what they intended to do. We've built a system to do that. We give you a code, you put it into a different device, a PDF of your ballot comes up. His second point was the lack of a dispute resolution protocol. And the reason why that's not in the tech that we have built is every jurisdiction has totally different views as to how they want to handle that. So whatever approach, you know, any specific city, county, state wants to use, that could then be built by whatever vendor they're working with into the system. And then his third point was just the risk of malware. And he's right. That is a risk that exists every time that you go on the internet, every time you use your phone, every time you use your iPad, no matter what.
Things go wrong at polling places all of the time. The volunteers don't show up. Someone pulls the fire alarm. And then with mail-in ballots, trucks get lost. Ballots get lost. Crates get lost. So, you know, to say that you need this absolute standard of perfection for mobile voting when the real ways that we vote today are far below that doesn't make sense. Let cities opt into it if they want to, so they don't even have to. If they choose to, it would be one of several forms of voting. And it would only apply to the most, you know, local municipal elections and see what works and go from there.
To deny ourselves that opportunity and to keep the system the way it is when the technology exists - it's built, I pay for it, it's free, I'm giving it away - just doesn't make any sense. If you don't do something and you just sit here and explain why nothing can ever work and nothing can ever change, you are throwing in the towel on this country completely, and I'm not willing to do that.
PARKS: That's Bradley Tusk. He runs the Mobile Voting project. Thank you so much for talking with us today.
TUSK: Yeah, thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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