Joe Kiniry, a security expert specializing in elections, was attending the annual conference on voting technology in Washington, D.C., when a woman approached him with an unusual offer. She said she represented a wealthy client interested in financing voting systems that would encourage higher turnout. Did he have any ideas? “I told her you should stay away from voting online because it’s really, really hard,” he says.
He later found out who sent her. It was Bradley Tuskpolitical consultant and policy fixer in Up-to-date York for companies like Uber fighting regulations. He made a fortune doing this (Uber’s early shares helped a lot) and he wanted to spend much of that money on online voting technology. Tusk convinced Kiniry to cooperate with him. At least, Kiniry thought, it would be a worthwhile research project.
Today, Tusk shows the fruits of this cooperation. His Mobile Voting Foundation slows down VoteSafelya cryptography-based protocol designed to facilitate people cast votes securely on iPhones and Android devices. The protocol is open source and available on GitHub for everyone to test, improve and develop. Two election technology providers have already committed to using it – perhaps as early as 2026. Tusk claims that mobile voting will save our democracy. But getting it accepted by lawmakers and the public is going to be the really, really tough part.
Basic numbers
Tusk has been obsessed with mobile voting for some time. Around 2017, it began taking major action, funding diminutive elections that leveraged existing technology to enable people who were deployed or had disabilities to vote. He estimates he has lost $20 million so far and plans to continue contributing to the cause. When I ask why, he explains that working with the government gave him a panoramic view of its failures. Tusk believes there is one point of pressure that can fix a number of discrepancies between what society deserves and what it gets: more people using the ballot box. “We have a poor, or corrupt, government because so few people vote, especially in off-calendar year elections and primaries, where turnout is dismal,” he says. “If primary voter turnout is 37 percent instead of 9 percent, the primary political incentive for an elected official to change — it pushes him to the middle and he is not rewarded for shouting and pointing fingers.”
For Tusk, mobile voting is obvious: 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. Moreover, he says, “if that doesn’t happen, I don’t think we will be one country in 20 years, because if you don’t solve any single problem that is important to people, they will eventually decide not to continue.”
Tusk commissioned Kiniry to evaluate existing online voting platforms – including some that Tusk himself paid for. “Joe is considered an absolute expert in electronic voting,” says Tusk. So when Kiniry found these systems insufficient, Tusk decided the best solution was to start from scratch. He hired Kiniry, Free and fairto develop VoteSecure. This is not a turnkey solution, but an internal part of the system that will require a UI and other components to function. The protocol allows voters to check the accuracy of their ballots and to check whether their vote was accepted by the electoral commission and transferred to the paper ballot.
Tusk claims that his next step will be to “introduce regulations enabling mobile voting in several cities.” “Start small – city council, school board, maybe the mayor,” he advises. “Prove this thesis. The likelihood of Vladimir Putin hacking the Queensborough election seems quite small to me. (Next spring, some local elections in Alaska will be able to vote by mobile phone using software developed by Tusk’s foundation.) Kiniry agrees that it is far too early to use mobile voting in national elections, but Tusk is betting that eventually the systems will become familiar and people will trust them much more than traditional cards. paper. “Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in, right?” says. “This applies to every technology I have worked on.” But first the genie has to get out of the bottle. It’s not easy.
Crypto-enemies
The loudest objections to mobile or online voting come from cryptographers and security experts who believe the security risks are insurmountable. Let’s take two people who were at the 2017 conference from Kinira. Ron Rivest is the legendary “R” in the RSA protocol that protects the Internet, winner of the prestigious Turing Award and former MIT professor. In his opinion: Mobile voting is not yet ready for prime time. “What you can do with cell 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 trying to make these things happen in the real world, which is not the right way. They have to go through the process of writing a peer-reviewed article. Putting in code is not enough.”
Computer scientist and voting expert David Jefferson is also unimpressed. Although he admits that Kiniry is one of the leading voting experts in the country, he considers Tusk’s efforts doomed to failure. “I’m willing to admit that the cryptography is rock solid, 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 solemn security vulnerabilities.”