Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Plan to Make Mobile Voting Happen

Joe Kennery, A An election security expert, he was attending an annual conference on voting technology in Washington, D.C., when a woman made an unusual offer. She said she represented a wealthy client interested in financing voting systems that would encourage higher turnout. Did he have any ideas? “I told her that you should stay away from voting online, because it is very difficult,” he says.

It was later learned who sent it. Bradley Tusk, a New York City political consultant and reformer of companies like Uber, has been resisting regulation. He made a fortune doing this (early Uber shares helped a lot), and he was eager to spend a significant portion of it pursuing online voting technology. Tusk convinced Kennery to work with him. At the very least, Kennery believes this will be a valuable research project.

Today, Tusk displays the fruits of this cooperation. The Mobile Voting Foundation is launching VoteSecure, an encryption-based protocol that seeks to help people cast their ballots securely on iPhone and Android devices. The protocol is open source and available on GitHub for anyone to test, improve, and build. Two election technology vendors have already committed to using it — perhaps as early as 2026. Tusk claims mobile voting will save our democracy. But getting buy-in from lawmakers and the public will be the really hard part.

Prime numbers

Tusk has been obsessed with mobile voting for a while. Around 2017, he started getting serious, funding small elections that used existing technology to allow deployed military personnel or people with disabilities to vote. He estimates he has lost $20 million so far and plans to continue pouring money into the effort. When I ask him why, he explains that working with the government gave him a panoramic view of its failures. Tusk believes there is one leverage point that could fix a number of mismatches between what the public deserves and what they get: more people using ballot drop boxes. “We have become a bad or corrupt government because too few people vote, especially in elections and primaries outside of the year, where turnout is low,” he says. “If primary turnout is 37% instead of 9%, the elected official’s underlying political incentives for change — push him to the center, and he is not rewarded for screaming and pointing fingers.”

For Tusk, mobile voting is a no-brainer: we already do our banking, commerce and private messaging on our phones, so why wouldn’t we cast our vote? “If I don’t do it, who will?” he asks. Moreover, he says: “If that doesn’t happen, I don’t think we will become one country in twenty years, because if you are unable to solve any single problem that concerns people, they will eventually decide not to continue.”

Tusk asked Kennery to evaluate existing online voting platforms, including some that Tusk himself paid for. “Joe is the ultimate expert in electronic voting,” Tusk says. So, when Kennery saw that these systems were inadequate, Tusk decided that the best way forward was to start from scratch. He hired Kiniry, Free & Fair, to develop VoteSecure. It is not an off-the-shelf solution but a back-end part of the system that will require a user interface and other parts to be operable. The protocol includes a way for voters to verify the accuracy of their ballots and verify that the Board of Elections has received their votes and transferred them to a paper ballot.

Tusk says his next step is to “pass legislation” in a few cities to allow mobile voting. “Start small, like city council, school board, or maybe the mayor,” he says. “Prove the hypothesis. The odds of Vladimir Putin hacking the Queensboro election seem very remote to me.” (Next spring, some local elections in Alaska will offer the option of mobile voting using software developed by the TUSC Foundation.) Kennery agrees that it is too early to use mobile voting in national elections, but Tusk is betting that the systems will eventually become so familiar that people trust them much more than traditional paper ballots. “Once the genie is out of the bottle, they can’t put it back in, right?” He says. “And that was true for all the technologies I worked on.” But first the genie must get out of the bottle. This is not easy.

Enemies of encryption

The loudest objections against mobile or Internet voting come from cryptographers and security experts, who believe the security risks are insurmountable. Take, for example, two people who were present at the 2017 conference with Kinere. Ron Rivest is the legendary “R” in the RSA protocol that protects the Internet, a recipient of the prestigious Turing Award, and a former professor at MIT. His point: Mobile voting is absolutely not ready for prime time. “It’s interesting what you can do with mobile phones, but we’re not there yet, and I haven’t seen anything that makes me think differently,” he says. “Tusk is driven by trying to make these things happen in the real world, and it’s not the right way to do it. They need to go through the process of writing a peer-reviewed paper. And putting in code just doesn’t cut it.”

Computer scientist and voting expert David Jefferson didn’t like it either. Although he acknowledges that Kennery is one of the country’s top voting system experts, he sees Tusk’s efforts as doomed to failure. “I’m willing to compromise on solid encryption, but that doesn’t weaken the argument about how insecure online voting systems are in general. Open source and perfect encryption don’t address the most serious vulnerabilities.”