Millions of people already count on Zell to send and receive money, and our impact doesn't stop there. More than 40 million Americans saw our safety education content in 2023. So when you're sending money to people you know and trust, count on Zell. Terms and conditions apply. Hey, welcome to Politico Tech. Today's Tuesday, September 17. I'm Stephen Overley. What if you could pick up your phone and cast your vote? It certainly sounds convenient, skip the lines at your polling place, no need to miss work on Election Day, but cybersecurity and election integrity experts have warned that voting by phone or computer would be a logistical nightmare of its own, raising all sorts of troubling scenarios about hacked votes and compromised elections. Those fears have not deterred investor and political strategist Bradley Tusk. He says mobile voting is not only possible, but it's inevitable and that it is the solution to partisan dysfunction. Bradley has been on the podcast before and you might recall he's got a unique background. He started his career in politics, working for politicians like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Illinois Governor Rod Bogoyevich. He then helped Uber break into cities across the U.S. and made a fortune in tech and venture capital. He has made that for the last several years, he has poured into building and testing mobile voting technology. Bradley makes his case for mobile voting in a new book out today, aptly titled Vote With Your Phone. I called him up to find out why he thinks the fix to our broken politics is right in my pocket. Here's our conversation. Bradley, welcome back to Politico Tech. Hey Stephen, thank you so much for having me back. Of course, you know, I just finished reading your new book, Vote With Your Phone and the 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 a political candidates. Why do you think that's the case? I think it's so important because it's how we live today. Like you said, it's getting a ride or getting our food, it's doing our banking, it's doing a lot of our healthcare, it's organizing our love life. And fundamentally, you know, we have a democracy that I think many people would agree just isn't working. It is widely dysfunctional, it is wildly polarized and, you know, 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 to 15%. 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 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. Well, that's what I thought was interesting, you know, I kind of expected arguments about the convenience of mobile voting, you know, its ability to increase turnout. You argue that mobile voting is key to breaking partisan gridlock on issues like gun control or school choice or climate change. Can you connect those dots for me, like how does mobile voting change the politics of those issues? Yeah, let me give you examples that are in the book. Take guns is one of them. So in 2022, there was a mass shooting that a supermarket in Buffalo, 10 people died. And Chris Jacobs was a congressman from that area, a MAGA Republican partner, core Trump guy, but his office was about a mile from the supermarket. And he was, as you know, you would imagine most human beings would be very shaken by what happened. And in the subsequent press conference, he said, you know, maybe you ought to do something about work on laws. And just by the virtue of saying it, the local Republican party and conservative party stripped the ballot line for him. And two months later, he couldn't even run for reelection. Now why is that? Just turn out in his primary, it was around 12%, half of that 12% were NRA members. So the minute that he said, Hey, maybe guns shouldn't be quite as easily accessible. He alienated half his voter base and he couldn't survive. Now imagine that in the same primary, if people could vote on their phones, you know, maybe turn out goes from 12% to 36%, 40%, just based on the polling of Republicans, enough people would say, yeah, we ought to have some sort of reasonable rules. It might not mean an assault weapon ban, but something that not only would he not have been run out of town literally for saying what he said, but that would have been the right and smart thing to say politically and then would enable him to reach out to his colleagues across the aisle and say, okay, let's try to get something done. And that something doesn't mean something that we will all love, but at least it's something. And so whether it's the left or the right, politicians or politicians, they're always going to act in their self interest. And if we don't align the public's interest with their self interest, we're never going to change anything. And walk me through how exactly mobile voting would work? I pick up my phone and then what happens? So you download an app right now, it's called Vote Hub, but I don't care what it's called ultimately. And the first thing is you would identify where you're a voter. So you would connect with your local election official website and they would say, okay, yes, even as a voter in this district, this precinct, everything else. And we have to make sure that you're really stupid, right? And so there's multi-factor authentication. So kind of like if you're trying to log into your Gmail and they want to change your password or whatever it might be, you'll get a text saying, hey, here's your code, you enter that. And then the district, your election official has to verify that you're you. Those rules vary in every single jurisdiction in the country. So in some of the pilot elections we've done today, we've had things like facial recognition screening and biometric, whether it's iris or fingerprint. And in other places, the rules are digital signature matching. And then the ballot comes up and then it looks like kind of anything you see on the internet that you might vote on. That part is designed to be as simple as possible. And then when you hit send, two things happen. The ballot is immediately encrypted and you receive a tracking number that lets you follow the progress of your ballot throughout the system. Once it's encrypted, it goes to the election office where they take it offline and then they decrypt it. So nothing is decrypted until it's removed from the internet. Meaning the way that someone could hack you is because they can connect to you in some way through the internet. If the file is not connected to the internet in the first place, you can't do that. So it's taken offline, it's decrypted and then a paper copy is printed out. And then you use your tracking number if you want to to say, okay, my ballot has been submitted, received, decrypted, printed, tabulated so you can follow it all the way through the path. And then finally, all of it is open source, which means the code is out there to be reviewed. So that means that the election itself can be audited and authenticated by outside experts and it can give people integrity in the system because we're not relying on the word of anyone, including even election officials because it's all out there in plain sight. And I should know the reason we can do it open source is because all of this work and all of this technology has come out of my foundation. This is not a business thing for me. This is a philanthropic thing. I've spent about $20 million so far of my own money building this and a foundation owns it, not even mine at this point. And once we are fully done building it and we have submitted it for review to groups like the National Institute for Standards and Technology, NIST, and we're satisfied. We will say, okay, here it is world and we will put it up online and it will be free and open source and then anyone can use it. So you've actually used this technology through the Mobile Voting Project, pilots have been done in about seven states, I believe. What was the result of that? I mean, what worked and what didn't work? Yeah. 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 and Utah and 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. So with those two groups, they were able to vote on the existing technology, which we then built our technology after that. And here's what we found. Turn out significantly increased some places more than tripled to the National Cyber Security Center, audit all of the elections, and they all came back clean. And three, 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? And so what we learned is, turn out will increase, it could be done securely and people prefer it. What we also learned, that's your point of what didn't work, is one, you know, you still have to promote it, right? This does not feel the dream to 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, pop up, you know, today's election day or early voting starts today. Did you remember to vote? Click here to download the app. Do you know, a few weeks ago, we had Pamela Smith on the podcast. She's from a group called Verified Voting and I know them well, you know them well. And she sort of made the case that, you know, it sounds nice to vote online or vote from home, but internet voting, she said sort of fails on secrecy, privacy, and on security. You're obviously arguing the opposite. Can you just drill down for me a bit? How do you really make these platforms secure so that nobody hacks my vote, nobody votes for me, that sort of thing? Yeah. So the security comes from a combination of first all the different measures to ensure that you're you like biometric screening and multifactor 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 airgapping. Fourth is there's a print 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. So if along the way, a step isn't taken, you can see that and tell the election office hey, something's wrong. And sixth and finally, it's all open source. So it's all out there for verified voting or any cryptographer to see and say, yeah, you know, the code works or the code doesn't work on both parts, whether it is security or privacy, if the election officials themselves are corrupt, they could violate either those two things. You know what? That's also true for mail-in voting, in-person voting, paper ballots. And let me just make a little bit of a counter that I'm sure Pamela didn't want to talk about, which is if you remember in 2000, the election was decided because of faulty paper ballots in the state of Florida, those little things we call hanging and chatting, and right. And ultimately, we ended up with an unclear outcome in the presidential election. We don't really know who won. We know that Gore got more votes. So to me, if there's any form of voting, we really shouldn't trust its 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 it an additional option. We should have in-person voting, we should have mail-in voting, we should have mobile voting. I got my daughter off of college, she's a freshman a couple weeks ago for the first time. And when we moved her in, they gave her a key to her room, they gave her a key to the bike room. You know, it never once came up, a key to the mail room. And if my daughter got a piece of mail, she wouldn't know what to do with it. But I can guarantee that since you and I started this conversation, she's texted her phone 43 times. Right. And if we want young people to vote, we've got to meet them where they are, and they're the ones with the most to stay. Millions of people already count on Zell to send and receive money. And our impact doesn't stop there. We're helping users spot scams and fraud. More than 40 million Americans saw our safety education content in 2023, and countermeasures like real time fraud monitoring and detection help protect users. So when you're sending money to people you know and trust, count on Zell. Terms and conditions apply. You write in the book about the impact of Gen Z and kind of how younger folks getting into politics is transformed so much of the way politics is done. What impact is that generation going to have on mobile voting? I mean, if we get mobile voting, it's going to be because of that, right? In many ways, this book is an open letter to that saying, listen, the world looks really bad right now. And you know what, it's because it is, but the reason it is is because we have a political system that is so broken that we can't find common ground on things like guns or immigration or housing or climate or education or health care or whatever it is, because our incentives are so wildly skewed to the extremes. The challenge is we know that if you make it easier for people to vote, more people will do it. We know that if more people participate, that will shift the political incentives to the middle and let politicians work together again and get things done. But the problem is, and this is going to be true on both sides of the aisle, if you tell politicians, hey, we're going to change the system, and as a result, you now have risk of not getting reelected when right now over 90% of incumbents are regularly reelected, they're going to freak out, right? Because they like being in power and they're not going to want to go to the new law that risks their hold on power. The only way we're going to get it done is a movement from Gen Z, a movement from Gen Alpha where they say, absolutely not. This is my right. I insist on it, I demand it, and I am going to march for this and take action for it. A couple of other issues potentially that I'm curious how you deal with them. One is as more of our politics has moved online, we've seen a rise of disinformation. And I could easily imagine in a world where we have mobile voting, some illicit nefarious campaign that sends out a link and says, vote today, and it turns out your vote's not actually being counted when you vote that way. How do you deal with bad actors who might see mobile voting as a new opportunity to manipulate election results? It's a great question. So a few things. One is, in theory, that could be happening now with mail-in voting. In fact, most of the two country had access to mail-in voting in the 2020 election because of the pandemic, and I've never heard a single report of that, but still, you're right, there's a lot of bad actors online. I think it's a few things. I think the first is one, that's why being open source is so important because anyone can track how an actual election works, how many people voted, the votes that were cast, everything else, and then there's a paper copy of all of it. So one, that creates some integrity in the system. Two, mobile voting is not the only reform we need. So for example, in some that you've been talking about, California passed a bill recently to mandate AI safety testing. I believe that that bill is really important, and we need to heavily regulate AI. I think AI can be the most transformative technology ever, but that doesn't mean that the people who are making it shouldn't have to abide by basic rules and regulations. Number one, number two, deep fakes, right? We need real reform specifically around election fraud, deep fakes, everything else. Three, social media needs to be reformed in general. You and I talked about this the last time you had me on, section 230 needs to be repealed. We need some version of GDPR, which is the national privacy framework in this country. The antitrust efforts that are happening today, I hope the next FTC chair, or whoever wins the election, continues to push those policies. And so, yeah, I mean, the internet is both an incredible thing and a terrible thing, and we can't avoid and just put our heads in the sand and pretend that it doesn't exist because that doesn't work. That's the same reason why I didn't want to spend so much of my own money to build mobile voting technology when the systems that were already built seem to work just fine. But I knew that those systems would never rate the kind of belief and credibility that would let this thing work, and so I did it. And so, you know, we've got a investing technology, we've got to keep making it better, but we've also got to regulate it heavily. Let me ask a question on that. I don't think I need to ask it in a gentle way because you're a tough guy. There's a growing criticism right now of like the influence of rich dudes, right? And you're a rich dude who has funded this initiative and I totally hear you doing it for democratic reasons and philanthropic reasons. But I mean, should we trust a system kind of built by a rich dude with a passion project? Well, a couple of things. One is a sulfuric question. The system that I am building is, you know, I'm not going to go administer elections, right? I'm just creating code and then election officials decide what to do with it. I'm not going to be the one that they hire or work with to administer the elections. And the reason once code is open source, you can edit it however you want, right? And so I'm putting something out there in the world and then, you know, people can take it from there. So that's number one. Number two, I am a rich dude, but I do want to make it clear, I'm a first generation American. It didn't grow up with a lot of money. I spent the first 15 years of my career working in government politics and my first job at the New York City Parks Department paid me $22,000 a year and I had to live by that in New York City. And then look, I built businesses and I became a venture capitalist. I started investing in tech companies and I helped those companies succeed and I have made a lot of money. I've also given away more than half the money that I have made to causes that I believe in, whether it is mobile voting or all the work we do out of my foundation to promote universal school meals and mandate that. And so I can't change the fact that I made money and I don't regret the fact that I make money. I try to keep making more money. The question is, you know, what you choose to do with it. And I'm putting both my money and my reputation, you know, on the line to try to do something good for society. So you know, I'm doing the best that I can. No, I hear you on that. And one more question for you and that's just while you're kind of pushing for mobile voting and pushing for us to embrace technology, there are folks pushing the other direction right now, you know, including Elon Musk, for instance, has criticized electronic voting machines and there are others who have said we should go back to hand-counted paper ballots. Is that crowd tougher to convince than the cyber security crowd that mobile voting is necessary and beneficial? And short term apps, absolute look, there are cyber security experts that are just have already said, mobile voting can never work and they're never going to change their mind. So I understand that side. I don't know that they realize if they're doing the bidding of Elon Musk, of Donald Trump, of the powers that be, they are, you know, they in both verified voter being played for fools in my view and that they are effectively doing everything they can to enforce a totally broken discriminatory status quo. And look, when states like Texas or Georgia pass laws that really curtail voting rights, they don't say we don't want black people to vote. They say security, integrity, the same things that Elon Musk says, the same things that verified voting says, right? And to me, how can you accept living in a world like that? So then the question is, how do we get it done? And I'm going to start running legislation in different cities next year, where hopefully we can authorize this to everyone in a city in a school board election, in a city council election, very local elections, let's start different people's digital option. Let's see how it works. If it's working, great, maybe then we can expand it to state and local primaries. That's working maybe to house primaries and look realistically speaking, because of the influence of Trump. This is probably going to be in blue cities and states before red cities and states. And I would like it to be everywhere, but I recognize the reality of our politics today. But I also recognize that while Elon Musk is a genius and has created some great technology, the last thing I would want to do is sort of turn our democracy over to him. And so I think in many ways, his opposition to any of this stuff is a fantastic endorsement. And so if you're starting those initiatives in cities next year, when do you think we could achieve mobile voting? That's your sort of most optimistic timeline and your least optimistic timeline. Yeah. My most optimistic timeline would be that in maybe 25, more realistically 26, you're seeing municipal elections, maybe a handful of state elections. And for the next week, I come for the rest of this decade. It's mainly the state and local level. And then starting from there, going into house races, maybe Senate races, maybe by 2032 and the presidential race, there's mobile voting available, although keep in mind, the race that I'm the least concerned about is the presidential race, because it's the one election that has plenty of turnout, right? The one election that does not need mobile voting is is the presidential. 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, right? I did nothing. Maybe it's 20, 25, 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. And so if I can help make mobile voting happen 10, 15, 20 years faster, I think we can do a lot of good. Well, Bradley, the book is called Vote With Your Phone. Thanks for being here on Politico Tech. Stephen, thank you so much for having me. That's all for today's Politico Tech. For more tech news, subscribe to our newsletters, Digital Future Daily and Morning Tech. Our managing producer is Annie Reese. Our producer is Afra Abdullah. I'm Stephen Overlay. See you back here tomorrow. [MUSIC PLAYING]
