You fill out your ballot, make sure it’s what you want, and when you hit submit, two things happen: The ballot itself is encrypted, and you get a tracking number, like a FedEx package. Then the ballot goes back to the board of elections, and they take it off the network — that is, they split it up over the air — and they don’t decrypt it until it’s offline. Then, when they decrypt it, they print out a paper copy and mix it in with all the other ballots, mailed and in-person. You can track the progress of your vote through tracking numbers, so you know when it was sent, received, decrypted, tabulated, all of that. It’s meant to be very, very easy and intuitive on the front end, but very sophisticated and secure on the back end.
Makena: There are already some ready-made mobile voting software on the market, but you created your own. How is your app different from what is already out there?
Bradley: Four years ago, we put together a team of different companies with different areas of expertise and we’ve been building this system. It’s end-to-end encrypted and end-to-end verified. It’s sandboxed and has multi-factor authentication and biometric detection. Most importantly, it’s open source. I estimate we have eight to ten months of internal work left to do. Then we’ll submit it to Defcon and NIST and get all their feedback. Once we’re happy with it, we’ll publish it and it’ll be open source and free. At that point, any government can use the code directly and adapt it to their own needs for their jurisdiction, or they can ask a vendor to do it for them.
Then the third phase kicks in, which is why I wrote the book. As difficult as the technical part was, the hardest part is passing laws everywhere that actually allow people to vote legally.
Makena: Regardless of how secure voting may be anywhere, former President Donald Trump has normalized questioning the integrity of our elections. Could mobile voting make things worse?
Bradley: Is there really voter fraud? The answer is no.
It’s a myth invented by Trump because he can’t accept the idea of losing. But let’s accept that even if it’s not real, it exists because he says it does. Trump is going to raise it about any form of voting, whether in person, by mail, early or any other, if he thinks it could go his way.
I’m not proposing that we get rid of any current form of voting, and I would argue that what we’ve created is exponentially more secure than any other form of voting. I’m just saying that we make this an additional option. Some people will use it and some people won’t. My daughter, who just turned 18, will use it; my father, who’s going to be 80, probably won’t. That’s fine.
The chat room
Would you ever vote via your phone or an app? What do you think this could do for elections?
Send me your feedback at mail@wired.com to let me know!