You can pay your bills and see a doctor on your phone. Why not vote?

All that time working in politics left Tusk with the nagging feeling that most politicians are just trying to get past the next election, and if that election is a low-turnout, highly partisan primary, then the politics and politicians involved are going to be more partisan and divided, too.

But what if casting a ballot in a primary or general election could be as easy as buying eggs from Instacart? Mobile voting could make that possible, Tusk said.

“The whole point of mobile voting is to materially increase turnout, especially in primaries, to go from 10% to 30% or 40% to move things to the middle,” he said.

Tusk is so sure that mobile voting would transform American democracy that he’s put $20 million of his own money behind it. And after years of development, testing and piloting the idea, his nonprofit, the Mobile Voting Project, will soon make open-source code available to vendors to provide to local and state governments for themselves.

Early use of mobile voting among deployed veterans and people with disabilities in recent elections in seven states confirmed for Tusk what he’d expected — an increase in turnout. “When you use technology to make things easier, more people do it,” he said.

As for security, Tusk pointed to his process’s multifactor authentication, outside vendors and anonymous ballot counting as several ways to ensure election security. A tracking code for voters to see their ballots’ progress would add to voter confidence, he said.

Credit: Gilberto Tadday / TED

Credit: Gilberto Tadday / TED

But anyone involved in the 2020 elections in Georgia can tell you that making voting secure and making voters believe voting is secure are two different things.

Ed Lindsey, a former Republican member of the Georgia State Election Board, compared talking about mobile voting in Georgia to kicking a hornet’s nest. And after serving on the board in the aftermath of the 2020 elections, he’s speaking from experience. But Lindsey also said the move to mobile voting is possible, even if it’s a long way off. Like today, the biggest challenge in the future isn’t a question of technology but of trust.

“There are three questions we have to answer. First, does it make it easier to vote? That’s easy, yes,” Lindsey said. “Second, does it make it hard to cheat? Third, does it instill voter confidence? We’re nowhere near that yet. But once you answer the second issue, the third will come eventually.”

Tusk is meeting with mayors and city councils across the country to explain the technology and the motivation behind it — and also to encourage them to make mobile voting an option for voters in upcoming local elections.

“It makes sense to start at a smaller level, in part because the disparity between the impact on your life of local government, which is really significant, and the turnout in local government elections, which is really low, is the greatest,” he said.

He has also met with civil rights leaders and held a mobile voting event with members of the family of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“It’s the best sort of anti-voter suppression tool out there,” he said. Voters in a precinct with long lines could just vote with their phones instead, he said.

Tusk has enough money to get his idea to the public and make the source code free to local governments that want it. He can even work with them on the back end on the many steps involved in making sure ballots cast on phones and tablets are both secure and easy enough for voters to follow that they trust the results they get.

He could definitely also use a trusted southern Republican like Gov. Brian Kemp to vouch for the Democrat-turned-independent from New York to give the idea a conservative credential.

But what he really needs are voters to know about the idea, embrace it and tell their local lawmakers that they want to see it happen.

If you had told anyone 30 years ago that someday they would be watching TV, paying bills and calling for a ride from a stranger all by pressing buttons on a square in their hands, they would not have believed it. Mobile voting’s time will come, too, even if it seems hard to imagine now. Tusk thinks the sooner it comes, the better. And he’s spending an immense amount of time and money to make it happen.

“I would like this to just benefit democracy overall,” he said. “Ultimately, the idea is just get more people voting, and that will reflect the will of the mainstream, and that will be better than the will of the extremes.”

If that’s the outcome of mobile voting, I’d vote for that.