The US political system is broken — and the solution might be in the palm of your hands, says political strategist Bradley Tusk. Drawing on his deep experience with lobbying and marketing, he makes the case for allowing Americans to vote on their phones, explaining how it can be done safely and securely. Learn why mobile voting could be the best way to increase voter turnout, reduce political extremism and save our broken democracy.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Voting is a fundamental right in this country, and it's something that should be easy to do. So a question I've always had is, is there a world in which we could vote from our phones?
Venture capitalist and political strategist Bradley Tusk makes the case that secure, accessible phone voting is possible and would be a huge step forward to dramatically increase turnout and restore function, representation, and trust in democracy.
So let me ask you a question. How many of you do your banking, your healthcare on your phones? Right, of course you do. How about your love life, your entertainment, travel planning, all that kind of stuff? Right? How many of you vote on your phones? That's the problem. So I spent the first 15 years of my career working in US government and politics.
City government, state government, federal government, you name it, I saw it from pretty much every angle. And the main thing that I took away from it, really more than anything else, is why politicians make the decisions they make. Is it based on what they believe in? No. Is it what's best for their city or their state or their country? Not really.
How about what's best for their constituents specifically? Not even that. It's actually a lot simpler. Virtually every politician makes every decision solely based on winning the next election and nothing else. And that's true for the next election and then the next election after that.
And it's a problem in democracies all over the world, but it's especially pervasive in the United States because we have this corrupt practice known as gerrymandering. And what that allows the two political parties to do is divvy up all the legislative districts so that as a result, the only election that ever really matters is the party primary. Now, we had a big election last fall.
You guys might have heard something about it. And in that election, about two-thirds of Americans voted, but that was for precedent. I live in New York City. In 2023, we had city council primaries. Turnout was 7.2 percent. So I don't know if you guys have ever been to New York, but if you have, you will know we are not a shy people. And yet, in this city of 8.5 million highly opinionated people,
you could win a council seat with just 8,000 votes. And the same thing is true in state legislative races, congressional, mayoral, you name it, and it's true everywhere. So who are those voters? They're typically the far right or the far left or special interests that know how to move money and votes in low-turnout elections.
they dictate not only who wins office, but then what happens once they're in office. And that gets us one of two types of government. Either the chaos and dysfunction that we call Washington, D.C. or totally one-sided governments, whether it's the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left.
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