You can pay bills, swipe into a Metro station, order a car, and do countless other things on your phone. And now venture capitalist and former political operative Bradley Tusk wants D.C. residents to be able to use their phones to vote.
Tusk Philanthropies is bringing its mobile voting project to D.C., hoping to make the nation’s capital the first place in the country where residents can use phones and computers to cast ballots. Tusk, a former campaign advisor to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and one-time Uber official, has in recent years funded mobile-voting pilot programs across seven states — including Washington, West Virginia, and Oregon — largely to support overseas and military voters. But his effort in D.C. would represent the first push to make mobile voting a permanent part of elections for all voters.
“D.C. will be a pioneer for opening this up for all eligible voters. It would be the first in the nation to do that for D.C. elections,” says Jocelyn Bucaro, a former elections administrator in Denver who now leads Tusk’s Mobile Voting Project. “D.C. is really proving to be a place for progressive election reform and making voting easier and more convenient for voters. And I know the D.C. Council is committed to that. So we wanted to join their efforts and be supportive if we can.”
Tusk recently announced a $10 million investment to build a secure mobile voting platform, which Bucaro says would let voters use a phone, tablet, or computer to fill out a digital version of their paper ballot and then securely transmit to a digital ballot drop box, where election officials would print it out and count it.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Martin Austermuhle over at DCIST
