Why Bradley Tusk believes mobile voting is key the health of our democracy

As Election Day approaches, concerns about voter accuracy and the upholding of Democracy are mounting. Bradley Tusk, a political strategist and former Uber adviser, proposes a solution: mobile voting. Just as Uber revolutionized how we catch a ride home, Tusk argues that mobile voting could eliminate friction from the basic civil right to vote, and in the process, diffuse the nation’s divisive political reality. 

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

There’s uncertainty around misinformation, disinformation, and polling data. No one knows what to trust. And into all of this, you published a book called Vote with Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy. Now, I would say that some might argue that now is exactly the wrong time to talk about voting by phone if you want to save democracy because there’s already so much drama around voting fraud. Why now?

There’s only one election in the U.S. that really does not need higher turnout in mobile voting, and that’s the presidential election. For example, you and I are both in New York City. Do you know what city council primary turnout was last year here?

It was 7.2%. You could win a council seat in New York with 7,000 votes in a city of eight and a half million people.

I was Mike Bloomberg’s campaign manager. He ran for mayor of New York. I worked for him at City Hall. I was the deputy governor of Illinois for four years. I was in Washington in the Senate as Chuck Schumer’s communications director. So I’ve kind of seen this from every angle, and I took one basic thing away from it: Every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else.

And are there a few exceptions here or there like Bloomberg? Sure, but they’re exceptions. And because of gerrymandering, the only election that ever really matters is the primary. Primary turnout in this country is typically 10 to 15%, and who are those people? They’re the furthest left, they’re the furthest right. 

And that gets us one of two types of government: either the total dysfunction of Washington, D.C., where nothing can get done, or a totally one-sided government. Whether that’s the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left, I would argue that none of that is good. 

And until we have an environment where more than just the ideologues are voting, politicians are never going to have the incentive to work together and compromise. And we’re never going to solve our problems. Honestly, if we don’t find a way to radically fix this in the next couple of years, we’re probably not even one country in 25 years.

But not everyone wants more people voting.

Oh, most people in power don’t want more people voting.

When I was running all the campaigns to legalize Uber around the country, we were this tiny little tech startup, and taxi was this really big industry. But through the app, people were able to tell their elected officials, “Hey, I like this thing, please leave it alone.” And over a period of years, millions of people did, and that’s how we won every single market in the country. 

These same people didn’t know who their city council member was; they weren’t voting in state Senate primaries. They just knew that they liked this Uber thing a lot better than going in the street and hoping to find a taxi. And if all they had to do was press a button from the app to tell the mayor, “Hey, leave it alone,” they would do so, and my question was, would they vote this way? 

So the first phase of the mobile voting project was to fund elections in seven different states where either deployed military or people with disabilities voted in real elections on their phones. Turnout was limited to sample groups, but went way up in those groups because like everything in tech, when you reduce the friction considerably, people use it.

So that’s why I built the app. I’m going to get opposition all over the place, and the only way to overcome it is to do exactly what happened with Uber, which is to get millions and millions of real people to say, “Hey, I demand the right to do it,” and that’s how we win. 

If we were so divided as a country that we literally just couldn’t agree on anything, then you could say this is pointless and hopeless, but we’re not. Seventy to eighty percent of Americans would say we should neither confiscate everyone’s guns nor should it be easy to walk into a store and walk out with an assault rifle. 

The problem is those people don’t vote in primaries, so their views are not reflected. Immigration? 70 to 80% of Americans would say we should neither deport everyone who’s here illegally nor should we have open borders. They don’t vote in primaries, so their views don’t matter. 

Even abortion, right, the third rail of American politics? Two-thirds of people agree that there should be a right to abortion. The problem is that the people who actually vote in the only elections that matter, which are primaries, are ideologues, and they don’t agree. And so this is actually a solvable problem, but it’s only going to get solved if you reduce all the friction and make voting a lot easier.

When you look to build a movement around this idea, to what extent are you allied with the business community? I mean, we’ve seen business leaders become more wary about taking public positions on political and social issues with a few notable exceptions.

What business leaders want in my experience are two things. They want the best tax and regulatory climate they can get. But then they also want where they live and work and where their employees live and work to be clean, safe, well-run, with good schools and affordable housing and all of that.

They want the environment to be stable. They’re the disruptors, but they—

Correct. And the way you get a stable environment is by having centrist politicians. And the way you get centrist politicians is by having a centrist electorate.

Look, another reason I wrote this book was to build a movement, but also to get other people to start funding this thing with me because I have self-funded this completely, and I’m glad that I’ve been able to do it. But I’m not that rich. And a lot of people are a lot richer than me.

And I would like them to support what I’m doing.

You have a cynical, clear-eyed view of political leaders. What do you think the state of business leadership is right now?

I mean, I think that generally speaking, all things being equal, human beings would default toward doing the right thing and doing the good thing. But I think people are generally pretty self-interested. 

We look at why universities fell apart in the wake of today’s October 7, 2024, such as the one-year anniversary. Why did universities fall apart in the last year? Because if you’re a university president and the only people that you’re answerable to in order to get your next contract is an extremely progressive faculty, then all of a sudden, all the decisions you’re making are driven by appeasing that very small, ideological group of people.

If you are a business leader, who are you trying to appease? Your shareholders, the board, maybe employees. If you think there’s a real risk of losing them if you don’t do so, everyone has their stakeholders.

And so I don’t think business leaders, political leaders, academic leaders, or most people are really all that different, which is they want their lives to go as smoothly as possible. They want to sort of satisfy their goals and ambitions. And they’re going to do whatever allows them to do that. And I think that’s true across the board.