Venture Capitalist Bradley Tusk’s $20 Million Bet That Mobile Voting Will Fix Our Broken Politics

Bradley Tusk on CNBC

What if you could vote for the next president of the United States from your iPhone? Bradley Tusk , a venture capitalist and political consultant who ran Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 campaign for mayor of New York, has funneled $20 million of his own money into creating a secure mobile voting app that could turn that possibility into a reality.

This week, Tusk is out with a new book — Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy — which outlines the history and possibility of mobile voting. In an interview with Mediaite, Tusk said he hopes the book sparks a conversation about the technology, which he argues will radically increase turnout in primary and general elections.

Indeed, in the 2024 primaries that secured Biden and Trump their nominations, a Washington Post analysis found only 1 in 10 eligible voters participated nationwide, a low turnout that Tusk said incentivizes candidates to cater toward the interests of the extremes on the far right and far left.

“Every policy output is a result of a political input,” Tusk told Mediaite. “Every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else.”

That belief, as well as a career spent in politics and business — he helped run the successful early 2010s campaign that legalized Uber across the U.S. through mass digital lobbying of politicians — led Tusk to ask the question: could increasing turnout in primary elections put a dent in polarization and shift politics to the middle?

Not everyone is convinced.

Some cybersecurity experts have argued digital voting will never work. In response to an internet voting bill introduced in Washington last year, cryptographer Ron Rivest told NPR , “Informally, putting a server online to support online ballot return is like asking a kid to go play in traffic. It just isn’t safe.”

The integrity of the voting system in the United States has been a hot-button topic in the 2024 election, as Trump continues to claim, against all evidence, that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud.

Trump’s baseless claims about elections have sown skepticism among Republicans about the integrity of voting in the United States. Some polls have shown a majority of Republicans incorrectly believe the 2020 election was “rigged.” One survey conducted in December 2023 found that 85 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of Republicans, and 59 percent of Independents are very or somewhat confident their votes will be counted accurately in the 2024 election.

Tusk’s software, developed by his nonprofit Tusk Philanthropies, is equipped with security features like end-to-end-verification, air gapping (a security measure designed to isolate a network from unsecured networks), multi-factor authentication, and a user-friendly ballot check.

Tusk said it is designed to be safer than mail-in voting. He pointed to the Florida recount of 2000 in the Bush vs. Gore election as a prime example of mail-in voting’s vulnerabilities.

Another group that opposes Tusk’s plan, he said, are elected officials who benefit from the current electoral system and know how to win primaries by appealing to the far right or far left. As a consequence, elected officials are “held hostage” to the extremes, as Tusk put it.

Tusk argued increased voter turnout through mobile voting will incentivize them to work together and institute reforms that cater to a greater percentage of the population.

If approved by The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency that regulates such technologies, Tusk plans to release the platform’s code, making it free and open source, and introduce mobile voting incrementally — beginning at the municipal level. If denied, he said his team will continue improving the software until it is approved.

“Just insisting on the status quo is unacceptable because we have a country that is falling apart completely,” Tusk said.  “I don’t think we’re going to be one country in 25 years if we don’t fix this. So, if you’re a cybersecurity expert and you’re saying, ‘Well, I don’t think [mobile voting] can be safe,’ then help us figure out something that can, because ultimately just being against everything is the equivalent of doing nothing. To me, doing nothing is not an option.”