Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Plan to Make Mobile Voting Happen
Joe Kiniry, a security expert specializing in elections, was attending an annual voting technology conference in Washington, D.C., when a woman approached him with an unusual offer. She said she represented a wealthy client interested in financing voting systems that would encourage greater participation. Did he have any ideas? “I told him that you shouldn’t vote on the Internet, because it’s really very difficult,” he said.
Later he learned who had sent it. It was Bradley Tusk, a New York political consultant and fixer for companies like Uber, who was fighting regulation. He’d made a fortune doing this (Uber’s early stock had helped him a lot) and he was eager to devote a good portion of it to online voting technology. Tusk convinced Kiniry to work with him. At the very least, Kiniry thought, it would be a valuable research project.
Today, Tusk presents the fruits of this collaboration. Its Mobile Voting Foundation is launching VoteSecure, a cryptography-based protocol that aims to help people vote securely on iPhones and Androids. The protocol is open source and available on GitHub for anyone to test, improve, and develop. Two election technology providers have already committed to using it, perhaps as early as 2026. Tusk says mobile voting will save our democracy. But getting it accepted by lawmakers and the public will be the hardest part.
Primary numbers
Tusk has been obsessed with mobile voting for some time. Around 2017, it began taking serious action, funding small elections using existing technology to allow deployed military or people with disabilities to vote. He estimates he has lost $20 million so far and plans to continue investing in the effort. When I ask him why, he explains that working with the government has given him a panoramic view of its failures. Tusk believes there is a single pressure point that could address a number of mismatches between what the public deserves and what they get: more people using the ballot box. “We have bad or corrupt government because very few people vote, especially in off-year elections and primaries, where turnout is dismal,” he says. “If primary voter turnout is 37 percent instead of 9 percent, the underlying political incentives that make an elected official change — it pushes them into the middle, and they don’t get rewarded for yelling and pointing.”
For Tusk, mobile voting is a no-brainer: we already do banking, shopping and private messaging on our phones, so why not vote? “If I don’t do it, who will?” » he asks. Besides, he says, “if that doesn’t happen, I don’t think we’ll be one country in 20 years, because if you can’t solve one problem that people care about, eventually they’ll decide not to continue.”
Tusk asked Kiniry to evaluate existing online voting platforms, including some that Tusk itself had paid for. “Joe is considered the absolute expert on electronic voting,” says Tusk. So when Kiniry deemed these systems insufficient, Tusk decided the best way forward was to start from scratch. He hired Kiniry’s company, Free & Fair, to develop VoteSecure. This is not a turnkey solution but a back-end part of a system that will require a user interface and other elements to get up and running. The protocol includes a means for voters to verify the accuracy of their ballot and verify that their vote was received by the election board and transferred to a paper ballot.
Tusk says its next step will be to “pass legislation” in a few cities to allow mobile voting. “Start small: city council, school board, maybe mayor,” he says. “Prove the thesis. The chances of Vladimir Putin hacking the Queensborough election seem pretty low to me.” (Next spring, some local elections in Alaska will offer the option of mobile voting with software developed by the Tusk Foundation.) Kiniry agrees that it’s far too early to use mobile voting in national elections, but Tusk is betting that the systems will eventually become familiar, to the point that people will trust them much more than traditional paper ballots. “Once the genie is out of the bottle, they can’t put it back, can they? » he said. “That’s true for every technology I’ve worked on.” But first the genie has to come out of the bottle. It’s not child’s play.
Crypto enemies
The strongest objections to mobile or Internet voting come from cryptographers and security experts, who say the security risks are insurmountable. Take two people who were at the 2017 conference with Kiniry. Ron Rivest is the legendary “R” of the RSA protocol that protects the Internet, winner of the coveted Turing Award and former professor at MIT. His take: Mobile voting is far from ready for prime time. “What you can do with cell phones is interesting, but we’re not there yet, and I haven’t seen anything that makes me think otherwise,” he says. “Tusk is motivated by trying to make these things happen in the real world, which is not the right way to do it. They have to go through the process of writing a peer-reviewed paper. Putting code isn’t enough.”
Computer scientist and voting expert David Jefferson isn’t impressed either. Although he acknowledges that Kiniry is one of the country’s leading experts on the electoral system, he considers Tusk’s efforts doomed to failure. “I’m willing to concede foolproof cryptography, but that doesn’t weaken the argument that online voting systems are insecure in general. Open source and perfect cryptography don’t address the most serious vulnerabilities.”
