Bradley Tusk believes the political polarization in the United States is a result of two things: Politicians acting only to secure their seat in the next election — and everyday citizens abstaining from those elections.
“Virtually every politician makes every decision based on winning the next election — and nothing else,” Tusk said in his TED Talk at TED2025 in Vancouver, BC last week.
The solution? According to Tusk: Get more people out to vote.
In the 2024 presidential election, two-thirds of Americans turned out to vote. But in smaller elections, Tusk explained, even in New York, only 7.2% of people turned out to vote for a City Council primary.
“In this city of 8.5 million highly opinionated people, you could win a council seat with just 8,000 votes,” he said.
And those who are responsible for turnout are often those on the farthest ends of the political spectrum, or in special interest groups that are able to move money around to sway voters.
“Why can’t our politicians do the right thing for once? Because they’re held hostage by the extremes … We have to free them from their clutches,” Tusk said in the thesis of his TED Talk, which is expected to be released to the public in the coming months.
“The only way to do that is to get a lot more people voting, and the only way to do that is to meet people where they are: On their phones.”
Tusk is a venture capitalist and political strategist, best known for leading the tech regulation campaign to legalize Uber.
His 15 years working in city, state, and federal politics — combined with his knowledge of the tech space — made him equipped to be the person to bring mobile voting to the mainstream, he told Good Good Good in an interview at TED2025.
Now, he is leading the effort through his nonprofit, the Mobile Voting Project, in cities and states nationwide.
“I think, ultimately, we disenfranchise and disempower ourselves because we don’t participate in the process,” Tusk told Good Good Good.
But, he said, “we all have this device.”
In an era of rampant gerrymandering, long lines on Election Day, and a pending Senate vote on the SAVE Act, which would require people to present a birth certificate or passport to vote in federal elections, Tusk’s pitch is to bring the polls to the people — not the other way around.
“It seems to me that if you want to have broader-based rights and you want to have broader-based equity, you want more people to be engaged and empowered,” he posited, mobile voting would be a net-win.
Tusk said that the evidence already exists that putting something on smartphones will lead to people engaging more with it. But he also knows that safety is a top priority. So, he’s built a structure in which voting via smartphone is a safe, feasible reality.
Outlining an example for how he himself might vote in a New York state election, Tusk gave the TED audience a play-by-play.
“I go on the App Store, and I download the New York City Board of Elections app,” Tusk starts. Then, the app would prompt him to input his address to prove he is a registered voter in the city.
“Next is multi-factor authentication,” Tusk continued. “You know how when you forget your Google password, they send you a code, and you put that into the app? Same thing here.”
Then, the app would scan the user’s face, match it against the user’s government ID and would confirm once and for all that the voter is who they say they are.
From there, a ballot would appear on the app.
“Whenever I’m ready, I hit submit,” Tusk said. “When I hit submit, three things happen.”
First, as he outlined, the ballot is encrypted. Second, it’s anonymized. Third, the user gets a tracking code “like it’s a FedEx package,” so users can track their ballot throughout the process.
“Once it gets to the New York City Board of Elections, they air-gap it, which means they take it offline,” Tusk went on.
“And once my ballot is no longer connected to the internet, then they decrypt it, a paper copy is printed out, that gets mixed in with all the other ballots, and I know where my ballot stands because I can see through the tracking code that my ballot has been received, tabulated, and so on.”
Because the underlying code of Tusk’s mobile voting program is open source, anyone can audit and verify it, as well.
“To me, that’s a lot more secure than the way we vote right now,” Tusk said.
And to be clear, mobile voting would not replace all other methods of voting.
“If you like voting by mail, vote by mail. If you like voting in person, great, go do that,” Tusk said in his TED Talk. “If that’s you, knock yourself out. But based on turnout, that’s not most of you.”
Mobile voters would also be issued a digital sticker when voting via phone.
Regardless of ceremony, this method works.
In 2017, Tusk and his team created the Mobile Voting Project and worked with election officials in seven states, where active-duty military members who were deployed, as well as people with disabilities, could vote directly from their phones.
In one election in Seattle, voter turnout doubled — and tripled the next year — when mobile voting was employed.
In Denver, 100% of participants in a trial of mobile voting said they preferred it to traditional voting methods.
Tusk’s team has already built and “paid for” this mobile voting technology. As it is finished in the coming months, he said, it will be “free and open source to any government in the world who wants to use it.”
Now, he told Good Good Good, all that’s left is the adoption.
After the technology is released, Tusk’s organization will be introducing bills to city councils in cities across the country to adopt mobile voting in their upcoming elections.
“If we mobilize in every city where we’re running legislation, tens of thousands of people can tell their city council members and their mayors, ‘I want this thing,’” Tusk told Good Good Good.
With two children of his own, ages 16 and 18, he has hope for this transformation.
“Gen Z, to me, is my greatest hope,” Tusk added. “That’s where there’s so much opportunity.”
Overall, Tusk’s hope is in what a future with mobile voting could look like.
“We start to move things to the middle, and it starts to change the incentives for politicians, where they work together more, and they realize there’s less game for them in just screaming at each other and pointing fingers,” Tusk envisioned to Good Good Good.
“And then that inspires more faith and trust in government. That gets better, younger people wanting to run for office, to work in government. And that improves the quality of our government, which generates even more faith.”
In other words, when people have the tools to participate in the system, Tusk believes the system might actually work.
“We have a self-fulfilling process right now on the negative side,” he said, of the way the U.S. government functions.
“But we can recreate it on the positive side.”
Header image courtesy of appshunter.io on Unsplash
