Why you should be able to vote on your phone | Bradley Tusk

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Voting is a fundamental right in this country, and it's something that should be easy to do. So a question I've always had is, is there a world in which we could vote from our phones? Venture capitalist and political strategist Bradley Tusk makes the case that secure, accessible phone voting is possible and would be a huge step forward to dramatically increase turnout and restore function, representation, and trust in democracy.

0:48So let me ask you a question. How many of you do your banking, your health care on your phones? Right, of course you do. How about like your love life, your entertainment, travel planning, all that kind of stuff? Right. How many of you vote on your phones? That's the problem. So I spent the first 15 years of my career working in U.S. government and politics. City government, state government, federal government, you name it, I saw it from pretty much every angle. And the main thing that I took away from it, really more than anything else, is why politicians make the decisions they make. Is it based on what they believe in?

1:31No. Now, is it what's best for their city or their state or their country? Not really. How about what's best for their constituents specifically? Not even that. It's actually a lot simpler. Virtually every politician makes every decision solely based on winning the next election and nothing else. And that's true for the next election and then the next election after that. And it's a problem in democracies all over the world, but it's especially pervasive in the United States because we have this corrupt practice known as gerrymandering. And what that allows the two political parties to do is divvy up all the legislative districts so that as a result, the only election that ever really matters is the party primary.

2:20Now, we had a big election last fall. You guys might have heard something about it. And in that election, about two-thirds of Americans voted, but that was for precedent. I live in New York City. In 2023, we had city council primaries. Turnout was 7.2 percent. So I don't know if you guys have ever been to New York, but if you have, you will know we are not a shy people. And yet, in this city of 8.5 million highly opinionated people, you could win a council seat with just 8 ,000 votes. And the same thing is true in state legislative races, congressional, mayoral, you name it, and it's true everywhere.

3:08So who are those voters? They're typically the far right or the far left or special interests that know how to move money in votes in lower turnout elections. They dictate not only who wins office, but then what happens once they're in office. And that gets us one of two types of government. Either the chaos and dysfunction that we call Washington, D.C., or totally one-sided governments, whether it's the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left. And if we were truly hopelessly divided, if we just couldn't agree on any issue, that'd be one thing. But we're not. Most people agree on the solutions to most issues, whether it's education or health care or climate or taxes or...

4:00Let's take guns as an example. The vast majority of Americans would say that we should neither confiscate everyone's guns, but nor should it be easy to walk into a store and walk out with an assault rifle. But the problem is, those Americans, the people in the center, the people in the middle, they don't vote in primaries. So politicians ignore their views and cater only to the extremes. And when the next school shooting happens, and it will happen, all of us are going to bang our heads against the wall and say, why can't our politicians just do the right thing for once? Why? I'll tell you why.

4:40Because they're held hostage by the extremes. They're stuck. We have to free them from their clutches. We have to make it possible for them to move back to the middle. And the only way to do that is to get a lot more people voting, and the only way to do that is to meet the people where they are, on their phones. About a decade or so ago, I helped run a lot of the campaigns around the U.S. to legalize Uber. And I know that now when you guys think of Uber, It's this giant corporation. But back then, we were a tiny little tech startup, and Taxi was this big, politically powerful industry who really didn't like us.

5:22And we knew we couldn't out-muscle them, and so instead, we turned to the people. And by making it possible for our customers to tell their elected officials, hey, I like this Uber thing, please leave it alone, we were able to mobilize millions of people through the app to advocate on our behalf. And when mayors and city council members started hearing from thousands of their constituents, that's exactly what they did. They left Uber alone. It's how we wanted basically every market in the country. And while this was happening, I just remember sitting there thinking, God bless these people, they're making my job a lot easier, but my guess is they don't know who their city council member is.

6:07They don't vote in state senate primaries. And, you know, why would they? They're busy, they have kids, they have jobs, they have lives. But when we made it really easy, when we let people reach their politicians directly from their phones, everything changed. So what if we could vote this way? So in 2017, we created the Mobile Voting Project, and the first thing we did was work with election officials in seven states, red and blue, where either deployed military or people with disabilities were able to vote in real elections on their phones. Soldiers from West Virginia stationed in Afghanistan.

6:47People who were blind in Denver. In one election in Seattle, we let everyone participate, and after doing it for two years in a row, turnout tripled. Denver did a poll of those who participated in their election, and 100 percent, so every single respondent, said, yeah, I like pressing a button better than having to go somewhere. Shocking, right? In other big news, water is wet and ice cream tastes good. But that was for specific groups of voters, and we wanted everyone to be able to vote securely on their phones. So four years ago, we started building our own mobile voting technology. We're almost done.

7:27We're going to finish it this summer. And when we do, it's going to be free and open source to any government in the world that wants to use it. And to be clear, this is just an additional way to vote. If you like voting by mail, vote by mail. If you like voting in person, great, do that. Some people really like the ceremony that comes with going somewhere and waiting in line and all that, and if that happens to be you, knock yourself out. But based on turnout, that's not most of you. So let's give people another option. So as I mentioned before, and you can probably tell from my accent, I'm from New York, so I'm going to use that as the example for how it works.

8:06I go on the App Store, and I download the New York City Board of Elections app. And the first thing they do is say, OK, is Bradley really a registered voter here in New York City? I put in my address. Fine. Next thing is multi-factor authentication. So you know how, like, when you forget your Google password, they send you a code and you put it back into the app? Same thing here. Then we take a scan of your face, match that up against your government ID, and at this point we fully established, OK, Bradley is really Bradley. Ballot pops up on my screen, and the ballot itself is simple and easy to use, and I go through it, I take my time, no rush.

8:47Whenever I'm ready, I hit submit. And when I hit submit, three things happen. First, my ballot is encrypted. Second, it's anonymized. Third, I get a tracking code, like if it were a FedEx package, so I can track the progress of my ballot all the way through the process. Then it goes back to the New York City Board of Elections, and they air gap it, which means they take it offline. And once my ballot is no longer connected to the Internet, then they decrypt it, a paper copy is printed out, that gets mixed in with all of the other ballots. I know where my ballot stands because I can see from the tracking code that it was received, tabulated, printed, and so on.

9:30And the underlying code itself is open source, which means that anyone can audit it, anyone can verify it, it's totally transparent. To me, that's a lot more secure than the way we vote right now. And we've already built it, we've already paid for it, and we're giving it away to anyone who wants to use it for free.

9:58And with a little more work, I think we could do even more. we could register people to vote on the app. We could give voters nonpartisan information about candidates or ballot measures so you actually know what you're voting on. And versions of this already do exist. Mobile voting, in a way, exists in Estonia. They use it in party elections in the UK. Some municipalities here in Canada use it, but not in the US and not in most democracies. And that's where the hard part really kicks in. getting politicians to let us use our phones to vote in elections, because in my experience, people in power don't like making it easier for other people to gain power.

10:42And that's, yeah, exactly. And that's why I'm here, because they're not just going to do it if I ask nicely. They're not just going to do it if I snarl at the libertarians on X or at the liberals on Blue Sky. They're only going to do it if you make it happen, if we all make it happen. And we can. Every major right that has ever been won anywhere, the right to vote, the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, same-sex marriage, anything has only happened because enough people stood up loud enough and long enough and demanded their rights, and eventually the status quo had to give in.

11:25and we can do that here, too. We can make voting easier and a lot more secure. We can bring regular people back into the process. We can take power away from the extremes. We can end the dysfunction and polarization that plagues our society today. We can give our politicians the cover and the courage they need to work together and to finally, finally get things done. we can do all of this in the next 10 years. We can do it with mobile voting. Thank you.

12:08That was Bradley Tusk speaking at TED 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Thank you.