Bradley Tusk
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
But when we made it really easy, when we let people reach their politicians directly from their phones, everything changed.
So what if we could vote this way?
So in 2017, we created the Mobile Voting Project, and the first thing we did was work with election officials in seven states, red and blue, where either deployed military or people with disabilities were able to vote in real elections on their phones.
soldiers from West Virginia stationed in Afghanistan, people who were blind in Denver.
In one election in Seattle, we let everyone participate, and after doing it for two years in a row, turnout tripled.
Denver did a poll of those who participated in their election, and 100 percent, so every single respondent, said, yeah, I like pressing a button better than having to go somewhere.
Shocking, right?
In other big news, water is wet and ice cream tastes good.
But that was for specific groups of voters, and we wanted everyone to be able to vote securely on their phones.
So four years ago, we started building our own mobile voting technology.
We're almost done, we're going to finish it this summer, and when we do, it's going to be free and open source to any government in the world that wants to use it.
And to be clear, this is just an additional way to vote.
If you like voting by mail, vote by mail.
If you like voting in person, great, do that.
Some people really like the ceremony that comes with going somewhere and waiting in line and all that, and if that happens to be you, knock yourself out.
But based on turnout, that's not most of you.
So let's give people another option.
So as I mentioned before, and you can probably tell from my accent, I'm from New York, so I'm going to use that as the example for how it works.
I go on the App Store and I download the New York City Board of Elections app.
And the first thing they do is say, OK, is Bradley really a registered voter here in New York City?