■ In this week’s Backchannel:Political consultant Bradley Tusk has spent a fortune on mobile voting efforts. Now, he’s launching a protocol to try and mainstream the technology.
Joe Kiniry, a security expert specializing in elections, was attending an annual conference on voting technology in Washington, DC, when a woman approached him with an unusual offer. She said she represented a wealthy client interested in funding voting systems that would encourage bigger turnouts. Did he have any ideas? “I told her you should stay away from internet voting, because it’s really, really hard,” he says.
Later he learned who had sent her. It was Bradley Tusk, a New York City political consultant and fixer for companies like Uber fending off regulation. He’d made a fortune doing that (early Uber stock helped a lot), and he was eager to spend a good chunk of it pursuing online voting technology. Tusk convinced Kiniry to work with him. At the very least, Kiniry thought, it would be a valuable research project.
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