Joe Kinney, A The security expert, who specializes in elections, was attending an annual conference on voting technology in Washington, DC, when a woman approached him with an unusual proposal. She said she represented a wealthy client interested in funding voting systems that would encourage larger turnout. Did he have any ideas? “I told her you should stay away from Internet voting, because it’s really hard,” he says.
Later he found out who had sent him. It was Bradley Tusk, a New York City political consultant and fixer of companies like Uber, who was ignoring regulation. He made a lot of money doing this (early Uber stock helped a lot), and he was eager to spend a big part of it on online voting technology. Tusk convinces Kiniri to work with him. At the very least, Kinniri thought, it would be a valuable research project.
Today Tusk is showing the fruits of that collaboration. His mobile voting foundation is releasing 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 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 legislators and the public will be the really difficult part.
primary numbers
Tusk has been obsessed with mobile voting for some time. Around 2017, they began taking serious action, funding smaller elections that used existing technology to allow deployed military or people with disabilities to vote. He estimates he’s made $20 million so far and plans to keep pumping cash into the endeavor. When I asked why, he explained that working with the government had given him a broader view of its failings. Tusk believes there is one pressure point that can fix many of the discrepancies between what the public deserves and what they get: more people using the ballot box. He says, “We are considered a bad or corrupt government because very few people vote, especially in off-year elections and primaries, where turnout is disappointing.” “If primary turnout is 37 percent instead of 9 percent, the underlying political incentive for an elected official to make a change — it pushes them into the middle, and they’re not rewarded for yelling 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 vote? “If I don’t do it, who will?” he asks. Furthermore, he says, “If that doesn’t happen, I don’t think we’ll be the same country in 20 years, because if you’re unable to solve any one problem that matters to people, ultimately they decide not to move forward.”
Tusk had Kiniri evaluate existing online voting platforms – including some that Tusk himself paid for. “Joe is considered an absolute expert on electronic voting,” Tusk says. So when Kiniry deemed those systems inadequate, Tusk decided the best way to proceed was to start from scratch. They hired Kiniri’s company, Free & Fair, to develop VoteSecure. This is not a turnkey solution but a backend part of the system that will require a user interface and other parts to operate. The protocol includes a means for voters to check the accuracy of their ballots and verify that their vote has been received by the Board of Elections and transferred to a paper ballot.
Tusk says his next step is to “drive legislation” in some cities to allow mobile voting. “Start small—city council, school board, maybe mayor,” he says. “Prove the thesis. The likelihood of Vladimir Putin hacking the Queensboro election seems very slim to me.” (Some local elections in Alaska next spring will offer the option of mobile-phone voting with software developed by Tusk’s foundation.) Kinniry agrees that it’s too soon to use mobile voting in national elections, but Tusk is betting that eventually the systems will become familiar, to the point that people trust them more than traditional paper ballots. “Once the genie’s out of the bottle, they can’t put it back in, right?” He says. “This is true for every technology I’ve worked on.” But first the genie has to come out of the bottle. This is no cinch.
crypto enemy
The biggest objections against mobile or Internet voting come from cryptographers and security experts, who believe that the security risks are insurmountable. Take the two men who were with Kiniri at the 2017 conference. Ron Rivest is the famous “R” in the RSA protocol that secures the Internet, winner of the prestigious Turing Award, and former professor at MIT. Their view: Mobile voting isn’t 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 that would make me think otherwise,” he says. “Tusk is motivated by trying to make this thing 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 in code doesn’t cut it.”
Computer scientist and voting expert David Jefferson is also not impressed. Although he acknowledges that Kineri is one of the country’s top voting systems experts, he considers Tusk’s effort disastrous. “I’m willing to accept rock-solid cryptography, but that doesn’t weaken the argument about how insecure online voting systems are in general. Open source and perfect cryptography don’t address the most serious vulnerabilities.”