Rapid Response: How mobile voting can save democracy, with Bradley Tusk of Tusk Ventures

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1:33And that's crazy, right? We're going to take the country that is the most successful governmental experiment, successful economy in the history of the world, and let it all fall apart simply because we don't want to make voting easier. Like, that's crazy.

1:52That's Bradley Tusk, early Uber advisor, former deputy governor of Illinois, and an outspoken advocate for casting our votes via our smartphones. As we head toward November 5th, there's much attention and much anxiety about the safety and security of the U.S. election. Tusk argues that those concerns obscure a larger point, that it's the business of politics and elections that's crippling American democracy. The solution, he argues, won't come from the presidential race, but from the beeping, buzzing, tick-tocking device in our pockets. Whether you're intrigued or skeptical about Tusk's perspective, how he's put his Uber-based fortune into the cause is thought-provoking, so let's get to it.

2:37I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

2:44I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Bradley Tusk, a political strategist, CEO of Tusk Ventures, and a fellow podcast host of the show Firewall. Bradley, thanks for joining us. Yeah, Bob, thanks so much for having me. So you're joining in the final stages of what many have called the most momentous election in a generation. Uncertainty around misinformation, disinformation, polling data that's so close, no one knows what to trust. And into all of this, you published a book called Vote With Your Phone, why mobile voting is our final shot at saving democracy. Now, I would say that some might argue that now is exactly the wrong time to talk about voting by phone if you want to save democracy because there's already so much drama around voting fraud.

3:33What? Why now? There's only one election in the U.S. that really does not need higher turnout in mobile voting, and that's the presidential election. For example, you and I are both in New York City. Do you know what city council primary turnout was last year here? It was 7.2%, right? You could win a council seat in New York with 7 ,000 votes. I was Mike Bloomberg's campaign manager. He ran for mayor of New York. I worked for him at City Hall. I was the deputy governor of Illinois for four years. I was in Washington in the Senate as Chuck Schumer's communications director. So I've kind of seen this from every angle.

4:03And I took one basic thing away from it, which is every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else. And are there a few exceptions here or there like Bloomberg? Sure, but there are exceptions. And because of gerrymandering, the only election that ever really matters is the primary. And primary turn on this country is typically 10 % to 15%. And who are those people? They're the furthest left. They're the furthest right. And that gets us one of two types of government, either the total dysfunction of Washington, D.C., where nothing can get done, or a totally one-sided government.

4:33And whether that's the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left, I would argue that none of that is good. And until we have an environment where more than just the ideologues are voting, politicians are never going to have the incentive to work together and compromise, and we're never going to solve our problems. And so honestly, I think if we don't find a way to radically fix this in the next couple of years, we're probably not even one country in 25 years. I have been personally intrigued by the idea of voting by phone for years. You know, I figure if I can securely access my bank account and move money around, why shouldn't I be able to vote?

5:10But every time I bring it up with people in the know, political insiders, it kind of gets pushed away as being like not safe, not trustworthy. It's not good for them. If the status quo is working for you, you don't want mobile voting because all that does is introduce an element of risk, right? Right now, you know how to win an election with 10 % primary turnout. If we're going to get it up to 30 % primary turnout, that could go badly for you. And so, yeah, political insiders are always going to say that. When they pass restrictions in Texas or Georgia to make it much harder to vote, they don't say we want to make it harder to vote.

5:43They say security, integrity. The Heritage Foundation, which is a really conservative think tank, do you know what they found? How many, what percentage of votes cast are fraudulent? 0.000050, 0.506%. I worked in Chicago politics. That is as ugly as it gets. Guess what I never saw, never heard of, and not a single person ever brought up once? Voter fraud. It is not an actual thing. I mean, the reason why I built my own mobile voting app is because I knew that for as long as the people who were in power had the excuse of using security to not do it, that's exactly what would happen. We have built tech that is end-to-end encrypted, end-to-end verifiable, has multi-factor authentication, biometric screening, air gapped, it's open source.

6:32And I've spent about$20 million of my own money in total on the mobile voting project. And the reason why we've done all of that is simply because otherwise they would use security as an excuse to never change anything. But not everyone wants more people voting, right? I mean, that's - Most people in power don't want more people voting. When I was running all the campaigns to legalize Uber around the country, we were this tiny little tech startup. A taxi was this really big industry. But through the app, people were able to tell their elected officials, hey, I like this thing. Please leave it alone.

7:04And over a period of years, millions of people did. And that's how we won every single market in the country. These same people, they didn't know who their city council member was. They weren't voting in state senate primaries. They just knew that they liked this Uber. thing a lot better than going in the street and hoping to find a taxi. And if all they had to do was press a button from the app to tell the mayor, hey, leave it alone, they would do so. And my question was, well, would they vote this way? And so the first phase of the Mobile Voting Project was we funded elections in seven different states where either deployed military or people with disabilities voted in real elections on their phones, turned out limited sample groups, but went way up in those groups because like everything in tech, when you reduce the friction considerably.

7:46People do it. That's why it built the app. You're right. I'm going to get opposition all over the place. And the only one to overcome it is to do exactly what happened with Uber, which is to get millions and millions of real people to say, hey, I demand the right to do it. And that's how we win. And the other thing is, look, if we were so divided as a country that we literally just couldn't agree on anything, then you could say this is pointless and hopeless. But we're not. 70 to 80 percent of Americans would say we should neither confiscate everyone's guns nor should it be easy to walk into a store and walk out with an assault rifle.

8:19Problem is those people, they don't vote in primaries, so their views are not reflected. Immigration. 70 to 80 percent of Americans would say we should neither report everyone who's here illegally nor should we have open borders. They don't vote in primaries. Their views don't matter. Even abortion, right? The third rail of American politics. Two-thirds of people agree that there should be a right to abortion. The problem is the people who actually vote in the only elections that matter, which are primaries, are ideologues, and they don't agree. And so this is actually a solvable problem, but it's only going to get solved if you reduce all the friction and make voting a lot easier.

8:53So can you talk me through how mobile voting works in a way that would make, if I am uncomfortable about it, being unsafe? Is it relying on blockchain? Do you track votes? You're Bob. You live in King County, New York. You say, okay, I want to vote on my phone. You search for the New York City Board of Elections app. You download it. Then the first thing they say is, okay, is Bob really a voter in the city of New York? They establish, yes, Bob is a resident of this address. He's a voter here. But the next question is, are you really you? So the first thing we do is multi-factor authentication.

9:27So just like when you forget your password at Amazon or Google or wherever else, they send you a text to your phone. You have to put that back into the website. same thing here. Then there's biometric screening to make sure that you're really Bob. So they're taking a facial recognition scan of your face and saying, okay, does this match up with his driver's license or his ID or whatever it is? So once you've done both the multifactor authentication and the facial recognition scan, then the ballot comes up on your phone. So you make all your choices. You go back, you double check it, triple check it, whatever you want.

10:01You hit submit and two things happen. The first thing is your ballot is immediately encrypted. The second thing is you get a tracking number like you would say for a FedEx package. Like, okay, this is the tracking number for Bob's ballot. Then the ballot goes back to the New York City Board of Elections. And the first thing they do is air gapping. They take it offline. So now it's no longer connected to the internet. A paper copy is automatically printed out. It's then mixed in with all the other ballots, mail-in, paper, in-person, everything else. You can use the tracking number to say, okay, my ballot was submitted, received, printed, whatever.

10:36So that's how we do it. It's not over blockchain. It's done over AWS. We're using the same system that the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the FBI use. I think what we have is exponentially more secure than any other form of voting. And my personal vote, like I can track, but my vote can't be tracked back to me. When the ballot is decrypted and printed, it's just the ballot with the choices, but nothing to identify that you're you. So you say you put close to$20 million behind these efforts. And$20 million is a lot of money, but it's tiny compared to what a bad actor or a rogue nation state might devote to compromising a U.S.

11:19election. I do my banking on my mobile phone because the financial industry spends billions securing that. So how much would it cost really to make an airtight mobile voting system more broadly? This is why the code is open source, right? This is not meant to be V1 and there's never a V2 and V3 and V57 and so on, right? Someone had to do the first thing, right? And I decided that if I didn't do it, probably nobody would. And so I did it. And we've met with DARPA and others to see if they can sort of take the project from here. But two, that's why I want to start really small. School board races, city council races.

11:58So could Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un try to disrupt an election? Yes, they absolutely could try to. Do I think that they're really trying to disrupt the Brooklyn Borough president election? No. And so let's start small and see how it goes. And then if it's working, we can go to state elections. If that's working, we can start moving to congressional primaries. And we could do primaries before general and state and local before federal. So the elections that I'm worried about are not the really big high-profile ones where foreign policy is determined by the people standing up for election. I'm worried about state rep, state senate, city council.

12:3470 % to 80 % of the governance that actually impacts your life on a day-to-day basis has nothing to do with Washington, D.C. That's where your life is actually impacted. But it sounds like this transition, as you describe it, is going to take a long time. This is a 10-year process, at least. Yeah. Yeah. And are there, you know, when you go to talk to, as I imagine you have, to jurisdictions about expanding the pilot program, like what kind of response do you get? It depends on the election official, right? You either get people like Mack Warner, who was the very first election official in the country to do mobile voting.

13:08Mack was in the military. All four of his kids served in the military. And he found it unbelievably frustrating and offensive that you're risking your life to protect our right to vote. And then you mail in your ballot from Kandahar, and it shows up three weeks after the election and it goes in the trash. Martin Luther King III is a big supporter of ours because the reason they want you to have to be, like in Georgia, wait on a long line is to one, try to discourage you and tire you out, but two, to have an excuse to turn you away physically. He sees mobile voting as the best anti-voter suppression tool out there.

13:39If you're sitting in your living room pressing a button, no one knows what color your finger is, right? And so you've got lots of different groups already. So military, people with disabilities, civil rights. Think about people in North Carolina right now who are told their homes have been destroyed. How are they going to vote? But the bigger problem isn't even individual constituencies. It's just what low turnout means. This is a math equation. The only people voting are the extremes. You're only in the extreme outcomes. If you can move things to the middle, you're going to get a lot more mainstream politicians.

14:09And that's only going to happen if you reduce the friction of it. And so if you believe that we can do it securely, there's no reason not to do this. When you look at sort of the demographics of voters and the fact that younger people, they rely on their phones, they trust their phones in a different kind of way. Like when you think of that, do you think that voting by phone like is inevitable? Look, if I did nothing, eventually, 25 years, 30 years, at some point, sure, it'll happen anyway. But the difference is, I think that if we were to wait that long and just let it take its own course, look, depending on what happens in a month from now in the election, we could have all kinds of civil unrest and violence and bloodshed contesting the results of an election in four weeks.

14:56The country is in such dangerous shape right now that if you said we're just going to kind of let things unfold, the natural solution ultimately is a national breakup, right? And that's crazy, right? We're going to take the country that is the most successful country, the most successful governmental experiment, the successful economy in the history of the world, and let it all fall apart simply because we don't want to make voting easier. Like, that's crazy. I find it refreshing that somebody is taking mobile voting in the U.S. seriously because I do think it's inevitable. The assumption that the technology can't be safe and trusted never made sense to me.

15:33Now, will Tusk's product catch on enough to bring voting to the masses? We'll dig into that after the break.

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17:17So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free. Before the break, Bradley Tusk of Tusk Ventures talked about why he believes voting by phone can save American democracy. Now we talk about building a movement around mobile voting and the role that business might play. Plus, why he believes in effective altruism despite Sam Bankman-Fried's connection to it. Let's jump back in.

17:54When you look to build a movement around this idea, to what extent is the business community and business leaders allies of yours in this? I mean, we've seen business leaders become more wary about taking public positions on political and social issues with a few notable exceptions. But what business leaders want, in my experience, is two things. They want the best tax and regulatory climate they can get. But then they also want where they live and work and where their employees live and work to be clean and safe and well-run and have good schools and have affordable housing and all of that. Because you have human beings.

18:34They want the environment to be stable. They're the disruptors, but they want the environment around them to be the same. And the way you get a stable environment is by having centrist politicians. And the way you get centrist politicians is by having centrist electorates and voters. And so, look, one of the reasons, the other reasons that I wrote this book is to build a movement, but also to get other people to start funding this thing with me because I have self-funded this completely and I'm glad that I've been able to do it. But I'm not that rich. And a lot of people were a lot richer than me.

19:01And I would like them to support what I'm doing. I mean, it just seems like technologically, I'm not saying that it was simple what you've built, but it doesn't sound like it's that complicated, that the issue really is sort of public perception and lack of demand for this product? The lack of demand is—so that's why we tested some of the existing technologies with deployed military and people with disabilities to see, okay, what would happen when the actual supply was there? And the answer was turnout went way up. So the demand is there if people know about it, right? But they have to know about it.

19:35And like I said, I don't think most people are really engaging in, you know, thinking deeply about politics one way or another. Right. You know, we still have people who are undecided on the presidential election. There's four weeks to go. And Donald Trump's been in our lives for 10 years now in this way. So, you know, I don't expect them to until it becomes a reality in their lives or at least a possibility in their lives. You have a cynical, clear-eyed, I don't know, view of political leaders. What do you think the state of business leadership is right now? I mean, I think that generally speaking, all things being equal, human beings would default towards doing the right thing and doing the good thing.

20:20But I think people are generally pretty self-interested, right? We look at why universities fell apart in the wake of today's October 7th, 2024, such as the one-year anniversary. Why did universities fall apart in the last year? Because if you're a university president and the only people that you're answerable to in order to get your next contract is an extremely progressive faculty, then all of a sudden all the decisions that you're making are driven by appeasing that very small, highly ideological group of people. If you are a business leader, who are you trying to appease? Your shareholders, the board, maybe employees if you think there's a real risk of losing them if you don't do so.

21:02Everyone has their stakeholders. And so I don't think business leaders or political leaders or academic leaders or most people are really all that different, which is they want their lives to go as smoothly as possible. They want to sort of satisfy their goals and ambitions. And they're going to do whatever allows them to do that. And so, you know, I think that's true across the board. There was a time, a moment maybe when sort of business leaders were talking about, you know, higher level issues than just shareholder value maybe. And that they were trying to. That was a narrative. That was a media moment and narrative that as soon as they didn't have.

21:41Never true. You don't. Look, now I'll say more so. I don't believe in ESG, for example. Like, I think it's the worst of both worlds. I think it ends up being really bad investing and really bad kind of corporate programs. Like, for example, Citigroup. I'm a Met season ticket holder. And they have a sign that they give$2 ,000 for every home run hit at Citi Field to No Kid Hungry. So it amounts to like 200 grand a year or something like that, right? Very, very little. And the other thing I do with my foundation is hunger, right? And I've spent about$7 million of my own money on programs and legislation to mandate programs like universal school bills, exponentially more than Citigroup spends.

22:23And I don't waste money, you know, putting up a thing on the school board at Citi Field. I use the money to help kids, right? Why is Citigroup doing it? You know, all things being equal. Sure, they prefer the kids not starve. But basically they said, oh, we're in a world now where looking like we have, you know, a broader mission statement is important. And therefore we're going to do this marketing thing effectively, right? So look, to me, even though Sam Backman-Fried was a fraud, the underlying sort of premise of effective altruism, which is make as much money as you can and then give it away, to me is right.

22:54So there are things that I don't invest in because I don't believe in them. I don't invest in guns. I don't invest in tobacco. I don't invest in oil. But other than that, I try to make as much money as I can from my LPs. I try to make as much money as I can from me and my partners. And then I give away more than half of the money that I make, whether it's mobile voting or the stuff we got to hunger, or I meant before we started the show, I own a bookstore and podcast studio that loses incredible amounts of money every year. I have found that selfishly, when I do things with my money that make me feel good about myself, the ROI to me personally is higher than when I buy stuff.

23:29And so just in trying to develop the highest possible ROI for myself, if my choice is owning a bookstore that is a place that people can go and hang out, and we have authors every night and we're the only free podcast studio in New York and we employ 10 people and every time I walk in there, someone passes me on the back and tells me how wonderful I am because they know I lose all this money owning a bookstore and that validates my ego. That does more for me than flying private. I lose about the same amount of money running the bookstore that it would cost if I flew private instead of commercial.