As Americans continue to debate the security of election procedures like universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, the most severe threat yet to election integrity may just be rising to the surface: smartphone voting.
According to a New York Times report out last week, Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska, “is about to undertake an experiment that feels both inevitable and impossibly futuristic in an era of pervasive mistrust toward elections: allowing all voters to cast ballots from their smartphones.” During municipal elections in April, the Times said, voters will be able to cast ballots on their smartphones for six city assembly seats and two school board seats.
As the story quickly went viral, Anchorage officials scrambled to claim that the Times distorted the reality of the situation. Municipal Clerk Jamie Heinz called the story “an egregious misrepresentation,” stressing that no citywide shift to phone voting is happening.
“Two electronic voting options have been available to the public since 2018: voting by email or by fax,” Heinz added in her lengthy statement responding to the Times. “In December 2024, the Anchorage Assembly approved AO 2025-109(S) to accept ballots cast by secure document portal… Voters log in using their personal identifier and a unique PIN to complete a virtual ballot by 8:00 P.M. on Election Day. Their virtual ballot is transmitted to the MOA Election Center, where it is printed and processed alongside all other returned ballots.”
But that statement, which was meant to assure everyone that there was no ongoing threat to election integrity in Anchorage, only throws up more red flags. Not only does Heinz confirm that Anchorage is indeed implementing voting via smartphone (using the “secure document portal” she mentions), but we also learn that the city has allowed voting via email and fax machine since 2018.
The list of concerns is endless. Who confirms that it is actually an eligible voter casting a ballot online and not someone who knows the voter’s “personal identifier” and “unique PIN”? What kind of technical safeguards are in place to ensure that hackers and bad actors can’t create fake voter profiles and ballots? What assurances do voters have that the electronic voting system itself is trustworthy?
Heinz asserts that voting by email and smartphone is necessary in Alaska to make elections “accessible” to “those stationed overseas, attending college, or working on the slope and unable to vote from home during the time of the election.” But Alaska has been a state since 1959, long before the invention of the smartphone, email, and fax machines. For the vast majority of that time, the state has managed to conduct elections just fine in person with paper ballots.
Moreover, as the Times tells us, Anchorage is hardly the first city to test the waters of smartphone voting. The mastermind behind the scheme is Bradley Tusk, a billionaire venture capitalist and onetime advisor to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Tusk has funded a nonprofit called the Mobile Voting Project, which is pushing smartphone voting nationwide.
Tusk has run a similar play before. In 2018, he financed West Virginia’s experiment with blockchain voting through the Voatz app, calling it a way to “save democracy.” Election-security experts later warned that the results from the pilot program were unverifiable and vulnerable to fraud.
Anchorage is Tusk’s latest test case. He has said openly that the goal is to use small, low-profile races to normalize online voting and eventually push it into statewide and federal elections. The Times confirms as much, writing that Anchorage’s elections “could offer a blueprint for expanded use in future elections beyond Alaska.”
But for all the talk of innovation, every major U.S. cybersecurity authority still warns that internet voting cannot be secured. Online ballot return poses unacceptable risks of tampering and undetectable manipulation. While paper ballots can be physically examined and recounted, digital systems can be hacked at the server, the transmission layer, or the voter’s device, often without leaving any trace.
“Voting by internet is not securable by any known technology, and that’s not likely to change any time soon,” Princeton computer scientist Andrew Appel said. “Regular voting on paper isn’t perfect, but you can’t arbitrarily hack huge numbers of votes remotely with one install with paper voting. There are witnesses to every part of it.”
Real-world failures illustrate this point. A cyberattack disabled Ecuador’s overseas internet-voting system in 2023. Australia’s iVote platform crashed on Election Day in 2021, blocking roughly 30,000 voters from casting ballots. And the Voatz app, used in Tusk’s earlier West Virginia pilot, was later torn apart by a 2020 security audit.
Even if the software were flawless, the devices voters use are not. Smartphones infected with spyware, malicious extensions, or fake apps can expose how someone voted or silently alter ballots before transmission. And even if the devices were perfect, voters are not. Online systems depend on users spotting fake links and cloned apps, something scammers already exploit.
Take, for instance, one behavioral study that found that 23 percent of people targeted by online scams lost money. That’s a large enough margin to easily swing a competitive House or Senate seat. The same tricks used to steal bank credentials can just as easily be repurposed to mimic a voting portal or hijack ballots mid-submission.
Mobile voting is often sold as the cure for low voter turnout, especially in primaries. Tusk argues that letting people vote on their phones will boost participation and shift power away from entrenched interests, but the evidence simply doesn’t support that claim.
A study of Switzerland’s system found no meaningful increase in turnout from online ballots. And even Estonia, the global poster child for online elections, has seen no significant turnout gains despite nearly two decades of internet voting.
Anchorage’s pilot is small. It won’t change how most Alaskans vote next year, nor was it designed to. The more alarming story is what it represents: a national effort, led by wealthy technocrats, to persuade Americans that every civic problem has a software solution.
Tusk may be confident that he can engineer a more efficient and involved democracy than the one that already exists. But that sort of hubris – replacing tried, true, and secure elections with unproven and unsecure technology – should not sit well with the American people.
Sarah Katherine Sisk is a proud Hillsdale College alumna and a master’s student in economics at George Mason University. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.
Editor’s note: AMAC Action has been on the leading edge of the fight for election integrity. AMAC Members have helped secure dozens of election integrity victories in recent years, including banning Ranked Choice Voting in several states, passing robust Voter ID laws, and leading efforts at the federal level to secure our elections. Become an AMAC Member today to join the fight!
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