"Joe Kiniry, a security expert specializing in elections, was attending an annual conference on voting technology in Washington, DC, when a woman approached him with an unusual offer. She said she represented a wealthy client interested in funding voting systems that would encourage bigger turnouts. Did he have any ideas? "I told her you should stay away from internet voting, because it's really, really hard," he says."
"Later he learned who had sent her. It was Bradley Tusk, a New York City political consultant and fixer for companies like Uber fending off regulation. He'd made a fortune doing that (early Uber stock helped a lot), and he was eager to spend a good chunk of it pursuing online voting technology. Tusk convinced Kiniry to work with him. At the very least, Kiniry thought, it would be a valuable research project."
"Today Tusk is showing off the fruits of that collaboration. His Mobile Voting Foundation is releasing VoteSecure, a cryptography-based protocol that seeks to help people securely cast their votes on iPhones and Androids. The protocol is open source and available on GitHub for anyone to test, improve upon, and build out. Two election technology vendors have already committed to using it-perhaps as early as 2026. Tusk claims that mobile voting will save our democracy."
Bradley Tusk funded a project to develop mobile voting technology and recruited security expert Joe Kiniry to collaborate. The Mobile Voting Foundation released VoteSecure, an open-source, cryptography-based protocol designed to let voters cast ballots securely via iPhones and Androids. The code is on GitHub for testing and development, and two election-technology vendors have pledged to adopt it, possibly by 2026. Tusk has spent about $20 million backing mobile-voting pilots since 2017 for deployed military and disabled voters. Tusk argues mobile voting can boost turnout and strengthen democracy, but legislative and public acceptance remain significant obstacles.
Read at WIRED
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