Manny’s: Vote With Your Phone

Our democracy is broken because the way we vote is broken. But there is a solution: Mobile Voting.

Gun control. Abortion. From the halls of Congress, it may seem that Americans are bitterly polarized on the biggest policy issues of the day. But Americans are not as divided as we think, and polls show that most of us largely agree on even the most divisive issues. The problem lies in how we vote.

Politics is becoming more extreme because only the most extreme voters turn out in primaries. And with politicians prioritizing reelection above all else, they shun compromise, feed this extremism, and get rewarded for it. If a lot more people vote, the views of the electorate will become more mainstream, and our politicians and policies will shift.

Mobile voting is the solution. We do just about everything on our phones, and yet we still can’t use them to vote. But the technology exists, provides enhanced security over traditional paper ballots, and could exponentially increase voter turnout by:

Allowing Americans to vote from anywhere, on their own schedule
Making voting more accessible for people with visual impairments or for military service members—and their families—overseas
Incentivizing younger voters to participate by using technology they’re familiar with

From Bradley Tusk, philanthropist and founder of the Mobile Voting Project, comes a deeply informative and timely analysis of our broken voting system, introducing us to the history, opposition, and potential of voting from our phones. Including essays by Martin Luther King III, Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, and other prominent figures in the cybersecurity and voting rights communities, Vote With Your Phone shows us that the solution to restoring faith in our democracy is right in the palm of our hands.