Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Plan to Make Mobile Voting Happen
Jo Kiniry, a security expert specializing in elections, was attending an annual conference on voice technology in Washington, DC, 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 turnout. Did he have ideas? “I told her you should stay away from internet voting because it's really, really difficult,” he says.
Later he found out who had sent her. It was Bradley Tuska New York City political consultant and fixer for companies like Uber fending off regulation. He had made a fortune doing so (early Uber shares helped a lot), and he was eager to spend a good chunk of it pursuing online voice technology. Tusk convinced Kiniry to work with him. At the very least, Kiniry thought, it would be a worthwhile research project.
Today, Tusk shows the fruits of that cooperation. Syn Mobile Voting Foundation is released VoteSecurea cryptography-based protocol that seeks to help people cast their votes securely on iPhones and Androids. The protocol is open source and available on GitHub for everyone to test, improve and build upon. Two election technology vendors have already committed to using it — perhaps as early as 2026. Tusk claims mobile voting will save our democracy. But getting it accepted by lawmakers and the public is going to be the really, really hard part.
Primary numbers
Tusk has been obsessed with mobile voting for some time. Around 2017, he began to take serious action, funding small elections that used existing technology to vote deployed military or disabled people. He estimates he's dropped $20 million so far and plans to keep pushing money into the effort. When I ask why, he explains that working with the government has given him a panoramic view of its failures. Tusk believes there is one pressure point that can fix a number of mismatches between what the public deserves and what they get: more people using the ballot box. “We get lousy, or corrupt, government because so few people vote, especially in off-year elections and primaries, where the turnout is bad,” he says. “When primary turnout is 37 percent instead of 9 percent, the underlying political incentive for an elected official to change — it pushes them to the middle, and they're not rewarded for screaming and pointing fingers.”
For Tusk, mobile voting is a no-brainer: we already do banking, commerce and private messaging on our phones, so why not cast a ballot? “If I don't do it, who will?” he asks. Furthermore, he says, “if it doesn't happen, I don't think we'll be one country in 20 years, because if you can't solve a single problem that's important to people, they'll eventually decide not to continue.”
Tusk had Kiniry evaluate existing online voting platforms – including some that Tusk himself had paid for. “Joe is considered the absolute expert on electronic voting,” says Tusk. So when Kiniry deemed these systems insufficient, Tusk decided that the best way forward was to start from scratch. He hired Kiniry's company, Free & Fairto develop VoteSecure. It is not a turnkey solution, but a backend part of a system that requires a user interface and other pieces to operate. The protocol includes a means for voters to verify the accuracy of their ballots and verify that their vote has been received by the election board and transferred to a paper ballot.
Tusk says his next step is to “implement legislation” in a few cities to enable mobile voting. “Start small – city council, school board, maybe mayor,” he says. “Prove the thesis. The chance of Vladimir Putin hacking the election in Queensborough seems pretty remote to me.” (Next spring, some local elections in Alaska will offer the option of voting by cell phone using software developed by Tusk's foundation.) Kiniry agrees that it is far too soon to use cell phone voting in national elections, but Tusk is betting that the systems will eventually become trusted, to the point where people trust them far more than traditional paper ballots. “Once the genie's out of the bottle, they can't put it back, right?” he says. “That's been true for every tech I've worked on.” But first the genie must be out of the bottle. That's not a cinch.
Crypto Enemies
The loudest objections to mobile or Internet voting come from cryptographers and security experts, who believe the security risks are insurmountable. Take two people who attended the 2017 conference with Kiniry. Ron Rivest is the legendary “R” in the RSA protocol that protects the Internet, a winner of the coveted Turing Award, and a former professor at MIT. His opinion: Mobile voting is far from ready for prime time. “What you can do with mobile phones is interesting, but we're not there yet, and I haven't seen anything to make me think otherwise,” he says, “Tusk is driven by trying to make this stuff 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 up doesn't cut it.”
Computer scientist and voting expert David Jefferson is not impressed either. Although he acknowledges that Kiniry is one of the country's best experts on voting systems, he sees Tusk's effort as doomed. “I'm willing to admit rock-solid cryptography, but it doesn't weaken the argument about how insecure online voting systems are in general. Open source and perfect cryptography don't cover the most serious vulnerabilities.”
