Fixing Our Politics: The Case for Mobile Voting

A few days ago, I posted a piece defending the underlying technology of mobile voting. Then I realized I had never made the underlying case, except in passing, for why we should be able to vote on our phones. So here it is.

Let’s start off with something non-controversial: America’s politics are wildly, completely broken. I doubt many of you would disagree with that.

But here’s something maybe a little more controversial: I think we can use technology, math and human nature to make our politics a lot less broken and a lot more functional in the next 10 years.

I spent the first part of my career working directly in government and politics. I worked in city government, state government, federal government. In the executive branch and the legislative branch. I have a law degree and a decent sense of how the judicial system works. I ran political campaigns.  I worked in government in New York, DC, Illinois, and Philadelphia. I’ve run legislative campaigns across the country. I’ve seen the game from every angle and I took one thing away from all of it — every policy output is the result of a political input. 

In my experience, every politician makes every decision solely based on re-election and nothing else. Sure, there are exceptions. You’re probably thinking of one or two right now. But they’re so few and far between, to me, that just proves the rule.

Because of gerrymandering, the only election that typically matters is the primary. Primary turnout is typically 10-15%. And who are those voters? They’re almost always the most extreme — the furthest left and the furthest right. So that means our elections are decided by ideologues and by the special interests who know how to heavily influence low turnout primaries. 

What does that get us? One of two things — either the polarization and dysfunction we see every day in Washington. Or completely one sided governments, whether the City of San Francisco on the left or the State of Texas on the right. None of that is good.

Especially because as a country, we actually agree on most things. 70% of Americans would say that we should neither confiscate everyone’s guns, nor should it be easy to buy an assault weapon. But that 70% rarely votes in primaries. The 15% on the left who vote say no guns ever. The 15% on the right who vote say all guns, all the time. And so nothing gets resolved.

70% of Americans would say that we should neither deport every person in this country illegally nor should we have open borders. Again, most of that 70% doesn’t vote in primaries. So we’re gridlocked between two extremes. Even abortion isn’t that controversial — about two-thirds of the country agrees there should be some legal right to abortion. But again, most of them don’t vote. 

So put yourself in the shoes of a typical politician. You worked really hard to win your first election. You begged people for money, got attacked repeatedly, endured the humiliation of speaking to empty rooms multiple times. You won. And now you’re somebody. You get respect. Attention. People are really nice to you. You don’t want to lose your next election, which is really your next primary. 

So let’s say you’re a Republican congressman from Florida. Turnout in your primary is 12%. The district is gerrymandered, so only the primary matters. Half of that 12% are NRA members. So while you may want to do something about school shootings, you also know that if you even mention gun restrictions, you’re automatically going to lose your next primary. So you say nothing, you do nothing, and nothing changes.

Or let’s say you’re a Democratic state senator from New York. The public schools in your district are awful. And there are good charter school options available. You should be doing everything in your power to make it easy for the kids in your district to attend a charter school. But, turnout in your primary is 10%. Those voters are all extremely far left. And the teachers union spreads around a lot of money in your election. So while you know you should be helping the kids in your district access better schools, instead, you do everything you can to shut down charter schools. Because you want to keep your job.

In the early 2010s, I helped run a lot of the campaigns to legalize Uber and ridesharing around the country. At the time, we were a tiny tech startup and the taxi industry was muscular. So how did we survive their lobbying onslaught? We mobilized millions of our customers through the app to tell their elected officials that they did not want Uber to go away. 5,000 calls, emails, tweets and texts from constituents go a lot further with a councilmember than the few thousand dollars the taxi industry donates every few years. We changed the underlying political inputs, and that changed the policy output. Uber won. Everywhere. 

Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that the vast majority of people advocating for Uber never vote in State Senate primaries. They have no clue who their State Rep or City Council member is. We assume they’re too apathetic to ever care. But when we gave them the ability to engage politically through their phones, millions of them did. 

So what if they could vote on their phones? As blockchain and cloud technology kept getting better, a few startups in the space popped up. So I funded pilots in seven states, across 21 elections, where deployed military and people with disabilities voted in real elections on their phones. In two pilots, all eligible voters could use mobile voting. I covered the costs of running the election so the taxpayers didn’t have to pay for anything and some innovative election officials were willing to try something new. And here’s what we found: turnout on average doubled. The elections were audited by the National Cyber Security Center and all came back clean. The City of Denver conducted a poll among those who participated and not shockingly, 100% said they preferred mobile voting. 

But we started getting vocal opposition from three groups. From elites who only believe we should use paper ballots. From cybersecurity experts who worried that mobile voting was too vulnerable. And from politicians who know they can’t say that they don’t want more people to vote, but they have no interest in changing the system and making it easier for them to lose power.

The first group is easy to understand. They don’t want anyone not as smart or credentialed as them to vote. And that makes them so tone deaf, so offensive, they’re easy to dismiss. The third group — the status quo, the politicians, the unions, the lobbyists, the trade groups — they’re the ultimate fight. But first, we felt like we had to take on the concerns of the second group — the cybersecurity experts — or we would never get off the ground.

So we decided to build our own mobile voting technology. We brought in experts from every aspect of voting, digital identity and cybersecurity. Three years and ten million dollars later, we’re a few months away from releasing the final product. 

We have built the most secure voting technology that uses end-to-end verification and air-gapping to protect the integrity of every ballot. We have tested it repeatedly and asked the best hackers to have at it. The technology is owned by a foundation — it’s a not for profit organization, not a business in any way. And we are going to put the source code online. That means anyone can see it, access it, build on it, try to find bugs in it. It will all be free to any government or organization who wants to use it. 

It will take awhile for many cybersecurity experts to wrap their heads around our new tech. Their instinct is to say that things can’t be done and that’s what they’ll say here. But from my perspective, how can we not try?

At the rate we’re going, I don’t think we’re even going to be one country in twenty five years. We’re totally dysfunctional, totally polarized, and extremely angry. Whether it’s mass shootings or climate change or wildly expensive health care or failing schools or the opioid epidemic or crumbing roads and bridges or anything else — we can’t solve our problems because the underlying equation doesn’t work. 

If every policy output is the result of a political input and if the only people who vote in the elections that matter are at the extremes, it is impossible to get anything done. The only solution is to change who votes in primaries — to radically expand turnout. 

If a lot more people vote, then the views of that electorate become more mainstream. Politicians, who just want to keep their jobs, will shift with it, moving to the center. In fact, the vast majority of politicians I talk to desperately want to be able to work with the other side. They want to be able to reach consensus. They want to be able to compromise. 

Now, they don’t want it badly enough to lose their next election over it. But if their primary voters were more moderate and actually wanted results? That would change everything. Sure, there are some crazies in office on both sides. They’re only there because so few people vote. Mobile voting helps get rid of them. 

Let’s go back to our examples of school shootings and failing public schools. That same congressman, if turnout in his primary was 32% instead of 12%, would have to change his position on making assault weapons easy to buy because just based on polling of Republican primary voters on assault weapons, his voters would now want and expect him to get something done. The same State Senator who blocks charter schools because she’s terrified of the teachers union changes that position if turnout in her next primary is 30% instead of 10%. Because then the power of the teachers unions is diluted exponentially and she is now more beholden to her voters for actual better schools than to a special interest for campaign contributions. Keep in mind, in both of these examples, we’re still only talking about a third of voters participating. But that’s enough. 

Politicians are human beings. And no matter how much we want them to be better people, to do the right thing even when it’s not in their own self interest, that’s not how human nature works. And by the way, that was probably the case back in the Greek Senate and the Roman Senate and every other democracy across history too. 

So rather than just wishing for something that will never happen, let’s align the political interests of our elected officials with the policies we want to see happen. If only a handful of people vote, then that’s the signal, that’s the input, politicians will follow. If a lot more do, then the needs and views of the majority start to become a lot more important.

And that’s only ever going to happen if we let people vote on their phones. No matter how passionate of an argument we make about the stakes of any given election, the vast majority of people are not going to not take their kid to school on a Tuesday or be late for work to vote in a local primary. Maybe they should. But decades and decades of data tells us they won’t.

But do they have a smartphone sitting in their pocket? You bet they do. And might they use it to vote when they’re waiting for their coffee? Yep. At least some of them will. 

Sure, mobile voting won’t be perfect. Voting machines aren’t perfect. Vote by mail isn’t perfect. Paper ballots aren’t perfect. 

And most people who know how to win or influence low turnout primaries (politicians, lobbyists, unions, trade groups, advocacy groups) are not going to like the idea of changing a system they know how to control. For example, if I said to my old boss Chuck Schumer, “Here are twenty policy ideas you purport to believe in that would be more likely to happen if we had mobile voting,” he would just look at me like I have three heads and reply, “I’m not making it easier for AOC to primary me.” End of discussion. 

Overcoming the status quo is going to be incredibly difficult. Leaders of both parties will (ironically) unite in opposition to change. It’s going to take a movement to make mobile voting happen. It’s going to take millions of people — Gen Z, millennials, Gen Alpha — to demand the right to make voting easier and more practical. I know it won’t happen quickly. But I also know it’s truly worth fighting for. 

Because if we give voters another option — another way to participate — on top of the others we already have, more people will use it. I know that our opponents like to cite a few examples of other countries trying mobile voting and turnout not meaningfully increasing. 

Here’s my answer to that: Uber. Instagram. Netflix. Amazon. Every single app that has ever succeeded because they gave consumers the ability to make their lives a lot easier by doing something on their phones. History already tells us that more people will vote if we eliminate the friction, if we make it a lot easier. Logic tells us that too.

So let’s at least try. The technology is already built and it didn’t cost anyone anything. I paid for it out of my pocket and it will be available for free. Should we start slowly? Yes. We should.

Maybe we try it in primaries before general elections. Maybe state and local races before federal. Based on what came out of 2020, it seems more likely blue states will try this before red states. Fine. We just need to start somewhere.

Here’s what I know for sure. We can’t keep going like this. This country won’t make it. And the solution isn’t that complicated. It’s a math problem. Inputs dictate outputs. We can change the inputs with a device that every one of us already has in our pocket, a device you’re probably reading this on right now. 

We have a way to fix our democracy. A way to save our country. It’s not easy — but nothing worthwhile ever is. 

But what is easy is the question of whether we pursue this. We have to try. It would be crazy not to.