The Road Ahead For Secure Mobile Voting Technology

By developing new, secure technology, mobile voting can scale nationwide. Learn more and join us.

Last week, I was on the stage at TED2025 in Vancouver giving my first TED talk. I shared with the crowd how mobile voting came to be, how it will save our democracy, and how we are going to bring this option to more voters across America.¹

As we look to the future of this work and how our efforts will expand this year, security remains core to our mission. It’s important that we scale mobile voting when our technology meets the highest standards for security.

Our technology is going to be the focus of this (admittedly) wonky blog post, so here’s a preview of what I’ll be discussing:

1. The history of our tech development

2. Expert feedback we received on our initial tech development

3. The new software development kit (SDK) we’re releasing later this year

4. How you can track our progress and get involved

History of our tech development:

After supporting over 20 pilots for deployed military and voters with disabilities, we determined that the available technology to serve limited groups of voters was not scalable to all voters and that the private sector would never fund open source code in this case. Open source is necessary for auditing and verification. However, by definition, it’s also freely available to anyone to use. Experts in election security and cryptography had studied this issue. The US Vote Foundation offered a blueprint, their Future of Voting report, for what was needed to support secure mobile voting. The problem was that no one was really building to that blueprint. So I put up $10 million in philanthropic grant funding to build technology that would.

We launched the tech build in mid-2021 with grantees from expert development teams from Assembly Voting, the Open Source Election Technology (OSET) Institute and, later, NearForm. We engaged many external partners in the project, including the National Federation of the Blind, American Council of the Blind, Civics Unplugged, University of Colorado at Denver, Center for Civic Design, TurnUp Activism, 18by Vote, and HeadCount.

We set out to build mobile voting technology that met three key requirements:

1. It must be end-to-end verifiable, so voters can verify independently that their ballots are cast and counted correctly.

2. It must be usable and accessible, so voters can easily access, mark, cast and verify their ballots.

3. It must be open source, so any election jurisdiction or vendor can implement the technology and independent auditors can verify its security.

After three years, we were excited about the progress we made, especially on usability and accessibility. Using a proof of concept that our grantees built, we ran over a half dozen mock elections to test the usability, particularly the communication design and user workflow, and collect user feedback. We also conducted user testing with voters with disabilities, including voters with vision, cognitive, and physical disabilities.

Our studies yielded very promising results. After several rounds of tests and iterations, we found a successful approach that not only made the workflow easy to follow for test voters, but also successfully prompted them to use the verification tools that make this technology more secure. For example, in order to verify your ballot is recorded correctly, you have the option to perform a check before you cast your vote. Usability and election security experts have been skeptical of end-to-end verifiable voting systems because they assume that very few voters will perform the check to verify their votes since it's an extra process that takes a few extra minutes. But in our studies, we found a majority of voters performed the extra check with the prompting in our interface.²

Expert feedback:

We knew we'd made significant progress on usability and accessibility. But to determine if we met the requirements for security and end-to-end verifiability, we engaged leading experts in cryptography at Free & Fair to audit the proof of concept and ensure it met the standards set forth in the Future of Voting report. Free & Fair was a clear choice as they are leading experts in developing and auditing election technology nationwide by applying the same standards used to develop and audit software for highly critical U.S. government functions. The team also made the most sense since it includes Dr. Joe Kiniry and Dr. Dan Zimmerman, the lead authors of the Future of Voting report. They are the GOATs of electronic voting.

Their initial assessment found some gaps between our proof of concept and what the Future of Voting report recommended. Setbacks in technology development are not new, and when you're designing and building online voting technology, setbacks are not surprising. The team went further than simply pointing out gaps, They also offered to help us fix them.

New cryptographic protocol:

Last July, we kicked off this new phase of the project, engaging the team at Free & Fair, including Joe Kiniry and Dan Zimmerman, to design and implement a new open-source cryptographic protocol to support secure, verifiable mobile voting for U.S. elections and bring us closer to the standards in the Future of Voting report.

The project is unique in several important ways. The team is using formal methods to design and build the SDK. Formal methods are the new standard for designing and building high assurance and resilient software for critical infrastructure. In fact, the White House issued an executive order in January 2025 requiring the use of formal methods in software development for systems critical to the federal government. Free & Fair is applying the same standards in this project, marking the first software development project to use formal methods for online voting software.

Track our progress and get involved:

The project is also unique in that it is public. As of today, we've made the project repository public for anyone to observe and provide feedback. We invite you to dive in and observe as the project progresses over the coming months. Check out the project here: FreeAndFair/MobileVotingCoreCryptography.

The new protocol will be available later this year as an open source software development kit that any election jurisdiction or vendor can use to support secure mobile voting. Any jurisdiction or vendor that’s interested can get in touch with our team by reaching out to tech@mobilevoting.org.

Later this year, following the completion of this new technology, we are also going to be supporting grassroots organizations in cities across America to pass laws that would permit mobile voting to be an option in their local elections. I’m excited to share more about these cities in the coming months, and no matter where you are, I hope you’ll support our efforts. Visit the revamped MobileVoting.org to join us.

Photo credit: Gilberto Tadday

1. While my TED talk won’t be released online until a bit later this year, you can check out a preview of what I discussed in this interview I did on site in Vancouver.

2. If you want to see our case studies, check them out at FreeDemocracyFoundation.org.