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

As Election Day approaches, concerns about voter accuracy and the upliftment of Democracy are growing. Bradley Tusk, a political expert and former Uber consultant, proposes a solution: mobile voting. Just as Uber changed the way we catch a ride home, Tusk argues that mobile voting can end conflicts with the basic right to vote, and in the process, diffuse the divisive reality of the country’s politics.

This is an abbreviated transcript of the interview Quick Responsemanaged by the former editor-in-chief of Fast company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Quick Response features direct interviews with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Quick Response wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

There is uncertainty about misinformation, misinformation, and polling data. No one knows what to trust. And for all this, he published a book called Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Last Shot at Saving Democracy. Now, I would say that some may argue that now is the wrong time to talk about telephone voting if you want to save democracy because there is already a lot of game about voting fraud. Why now?

There is only one election in the US that does not require a large number of mobile voters, and that is the presidential election. For example, you and I are both in New York City. Do you know who turned out in large numbers for the city council last year here?

It was 7.2%. You can win a council seat in New York by 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 lieutenant governor of Illinois for four years. I was in Washington in the Senate as Chuck Schumer’s communications director. So I’ve seen this in every corner, and I took one basic thing away from it: Every politician makes every decision based on the next election and nothing else.

And are there a few exceptions here or there like Bloomberg? Sure, but they are not different. And because of the gerrymander, the only election that really matters is the primary. Primary voting in this country is usually 10 to 15%, and who are those people? They are on the far left, they are on the far right.

And that leaves us with one of two types of government: either the ineffectiveness of Washington, DC, where nothing gets done, or a completely one-sided government. Whether that is the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left, I would argue that there is nothing good about that.

And until we have a place where there are more than just philosophers voting, politicians will have no incentive to cooperate and compromise. And we will never solve our problems. Honestly, if we don’t find a way to fix this a lot in the next few years, we probably won’t even be a single country in 25 years.

But not everyone wants more people to vote.

Oh, many people in power don’t want many people to vote.

When I did all the campaigns to legalize Uber nationwide, we were a small tech startup, and taxis were a really big industry. But with the app, people were able to tell their elected officials, “Hey, I like this thing, please stop it.” And over the years, millions of people succeeded, and that’s how we won every single market in the country.

These people did not know who their city council member was; were not voting in the state Senate primaries. They just know they like the Uber thing better than hitting the road hoping to get a taxi. And if all they had to do was press a button from the app to tell the mayor, “Hey, stop,” they would do that, and my question was, would they vote this way?

So the first phase of the mobile voting program was to sponsor elections in seven different states where soldiers or people with disabilities voted in real elections from their phones. Turnover was limited to sample groups, but it went up a lot in those groups because like everything in technology, if you reduce friction too much, people use it.

So that’s why I built the app. I’m going to face resistance everywhere, 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 want the right to do that. it,” and that’s how we win.

If we were so divided as a country that we couldn’t agree on anything, then you might say this is futile and hopeless, but it isn’t. Seventy to eighty percent of Americans would say we shouldn’t take away guns from everyone and it shouldn’t be easy to walk into a store and walk out with an assault rifle.

The problem is that those people don’t vote in the primaries, so their views are invisible. Immigrate to another country? 70 to 80% of Americans would say we shouldn’t deport everyone who is here illegally and we shouldn’t have open borders. They don’t vote in primaries, so their opinions don’t matter.

Even abortion, isn’t it, the third train of American politics? Two-thirds of people agree that there should be a right to abortion. The problem is that the people who vote in the only elections that matter, the primaries, are opinionated people, they don’t agree. So this is a solvable problem, but it will only be solvable if you reduce all the friction and make voting much easier.

If you’re looking to build a movement around this idea, how involved are you with the business community? I mean, we’ve seen business leaders very wary of 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. However, they want where they live and where they work and where their employees live and work to be clean, safe, well managed, have good schools and affordable housing and all that.

They want the environment to be stable. They are annoying, but-

That’s right. And the way you get a stable environment is to have very focused politicians. And the way you get very focused politicians is by having very focused voters.

Look, another reason I wrote this book was to build an organization, but also to get other people to start sponsoring me for this thing because I’m completely self-funded, and I’m glad I was able to do it. . But I’m not that rich. And many people are much richer than me.

And I would like them to support what I do.

He has a different perspective, and clear eyes about political leaders. What do you think the state of business leadership is like right now?

I mean, I think that in general, all things being equal, people would be compelled to do what is right and do good. But I think people usually think about themselves.

We look at why universities disband after October 7, 2024, as the one-year anniversary. Why did universities split last year? Because if you’re the president of a university and the only people you have to answer to in order to get your next contract is the most advanced skill, then suddenly, every decision you make is driven by appeasement of that. a small group, of people’s opinions.

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

So I don’t think that business leaders, political leaders, educational leaders, or most people are very different, meaning they want their lives to go as smoothly as possible. They want to satisfy their goals and desires. And they will do anything that allows them to do that. And I think that’s true across the country.