This hurricane season, mobile voting could empower disenfranchised voters

Hurricane Helene left a horrific path of destruction in Western North Carolina. Entire towns have been flooded off the map. Highways torn up. Mail service suspended. A death count in triple digits and rising. 

Given that, it’s safe to assume that the last thing that’s on their mind is voting a month from now in the election. But that doesn’t mean they should lose their right to vote either. 

Each year, 1.2 million Americans are displaced due to natural disasters, and severe weather is only getting worse. As of this writing, mandatory evacuation orders have been issued for at least nine counties in Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton.

Researchers from Climate Central and the Council on Foreign Relations have called climate change a genuine threat to democracy here and abroad. In 2020, voting by mail provided Americans with a safe way to vote during the height of the pandemic. But there is no safe way to vote — or any way to vote — if you have been forced to evacuate or your mail service has been suspended.

Take Hurricane Michael in 2018. The category-five storm struck less than a month before Election Day. Michael forced Florida officials to scramble and provide voters with ballots and poll sites. 

Or take the Colorado wildfires of 2020. Thousands of residents were forced to evacuate. Not only that, but mail-in ballots too had to be evacuated from drop boxes so they could be safely counted. This required sheriffs to accompany a bipartisan group of election officials to retrieve ballots inside the dangerous wildfire zone. 

The list goes on. In November 2012, Superstorm Sandy. On Super Tuesday 2024, a blizzard in Lake Tahoe and wildfires in the Texas panhandle. And Helene and Milton’s full impact on elections next month is still unknown. 

Voters shouldn’t be disenfranchised during election season because a natural disaster has forced them to flee their homes. Election officials shouldn’t have to put their lives in danger to save mail-in ballots. 

I founded the Mobile Voting Project because I believe there’s a solution in the palm of our hands: voting from our phones. 

Mobile voting puts ballots on devices that we carry with us, even when fleeing natural disasters. It mitigates the risk of relying on mail-in ballots that may not be able to be sent or delivered, or in-person voting at a location that may be unsafe.

Mobile voting or electronic ballot return is already an option in 32 states, mostly for voters with disabilities or in the military. It’s been successfully used in over 300 jurisdictions. 

In Seattle’s King County, turnout increased nearly 100 percent once mobile voting became an option for all voters in an election there. In Denver, 100 percent of voters surveyed said they prefer voting from their phone over other methods.

How do we expand mobile voting to more voters, especially those facing natural disasters? First, it depends on states, cities and counties to pass legislation permitting this method. Nothing happens without that. Then we need the technology to make it happen. 

At the Mobile Voting Project, we’ve brought together a dream team of cybersecurity experts to develop an accessible new end-to-end encrypted and open-source mobile voting platform that will allow the technology to securely scale to many more voters. The technology will also be end-to-end verifiable so voters can independently verify their ballot is secure at every stage, and will use multi-factor authentication, ID match and even biometric screening to ensure only eligible voters can vote. 

And the system still produces a paper ballot for tabulation, recounts, and audits. It follows the requirements set forth by the US Vote Foundation and we will share the technology for review with the National Institute of Standards and Technology next year, after which it will be free to license and use by election officials around the country.

Right now in North Carolina, polls are showing a deadlocked race for president. According to the North Carolina Board of Elections, 10,000 voters from Asheville and the surrounding Buncombe County have requested absentee ballots. 

One Board of Elections member in Wake County said that polling places and ballots in mailboxes could have been “completely washed away.”  

The executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, Karen Brison Bell, said that one staffer in the Asheville area walked four or five miles to get to the county office. 

These Americans have had everything taken from them in Helene’s wake. We can’t take their vote too.

And now with Hurricane Milton barrelling towards Tampa Bay and severe weather only getting worse, we need to guarantee that voters fleeing a natural disaster or other emergency have a mobile voting option.

Bradley Tusk is the founder of the Mobile Voting Project and author of the new book, “Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot At Saving Democracy.”