A wealthy New York venture capitalist is betting big on the future of voting, spending millions of his own fortune to develop a safe way to cast ballots from a smartphone. 

Bradley Tusk, founder of the Mobile Voting Project, says it's the future of our elections and would combat low voter turnout that has been blamed for putting candidates with fringe ideas into office. 

The entrepreneur, philanthropist and political strategist shared his plan to bring voting to smartphones with CBS News New York at his Manhattan book store on the Lower East Side. 

"We have spent the last four years, and I've spend $20 million of my own money, and this is totally philanthropic, by the way, to try to build the most secure voting technology we've ever had," Tusk said. "We're going to take the technology that you use right now for your banking, your health care, your love life, so you can vote securely on your phone." 

While that may sound great to a lot of people, others wonder what protections would be in place to guarantee the security and integrity of the vote. 

"The first thing is multifactor authentication. They send you a code and then biometric screening," Tusk said. "So this is exponentially more complicated and secure than any way we currently verify voters." 

Testing the app with a sample ballot

Tusk's app, as it exists now, is still in a beta phase as it continues to be developed. Various iterations have already been used in smaller elections around the United States. 

For demonstration purposes, Tusk and his team put together a mock ballot and walked us through the process.

Some simple prompts moved us through the sign-up process and secure sign-in, including confirming our identity (Jane Doe, in this case), then requesting and receiving a code for two-factor authentication.

Next, we selected the prompts to "Begin voting" and "Mark my ballot." A slate of pretend candidates filled the digital ballot. We voted for Henry David Thoreau and Cat Stevens in a ranked-choice election, then clicked "Confirm votes." 

Once that was done, we digitally signed an affidavit an officially cast our mock ballot. 

"The ballot's encrypted. It's anonymized and you get a tracking code, like for a FedEx package," Tusk said. 

Obstacles of traditional voting

Like most technology, some people will find it extremely helpful, while others will be skeptical.

"The people who are for it, deployed military and military families, people with disabilities, Gen Z, clearly," Tusk said. "The people who don't want it at the end of the day, really are the people who benefit from the status quo." 

There are legal protections and required accommodations for disabled voters, and members of the military must legally be able to vote. But that does not mean the process always works. 

"In the last election for NYC's mayor, I was deployed overseas, and when I was looking to cast my ballot, there was a lot of inaccess when it came to absentee ballot voting," said Michael Matos, who served in the U.S. Coast Guard for a decade. "I wanted to contribute to my community while I was serving the country. But in that time, I felt like my voice was extinguished." 

The Election Assistance Commission found 1 in 7 voters with disabilities reported difficulties voting. 

"The mobile phone is really key to people that are visually impaired. So using it as a device to vote is just another way that it would empower the community," said Cheryl Pemberton-Graves, chief volunteer officer for Lighthouse Guild. 

States already testing mobile phone voting

Over the last decade, mobile phone voting has already been tested in seven states, Tusk said.

In 2016, about half the counties in West Virginia had a successful trial run with deployed service members. 

"They loved the process," said Matthew Gallagher, the program's director in the West Virginia Secretary of State's Office. "It took them about 10 minutes to request their ballot, authenticate on the app, vote their ballot and then return it." 

We asked Gallagher if anything about the process gave him pause. 

"We always say that the gold standard is in-person on Election Day. We have never advocated that this be a replacement for in-person on Election Day. We have always said that this is a narrowly tailored tool to use for specific populations," he said. 

Potential security vulnerabilities

Tusk's eventual goal is for everyone to have access to mobile phone voting, making it as easy as sending a text. He admits we're not there yet, in the broad sense of the technology's rollout or acceptance in some localities, including New York. 

"Could we do this through the Charter Revision Commission just for New York City? So far, the answer is no. You probably need a change in state legislation," Tusk said.

Then, there are serious considerations about security. 

"All voting systems can be vulnerable to manipulation. The difference of an online system is that it can be vulnerable to anyone in the world," said Susan Greenhalgh, senior advisor on election security at Free Speech for People. "My postal worker could absolutely take my mail ballot and tear it up or throw it in the trash or what have you. But that's one ballot at a time."

"When you're talking about online voting, any criminal anywhere in the world can potentially attack an election," she explained. "The stealth sophistication abilities of cybercriminals and nation state actors have only improved. So we are facing a very difficult problem to solve." 

Building acceptance 

Tusk would argue an app is much more secure than voting in person, but Greenhalgh disagrees. 

"His arguments that there's encryption, that there's the paper ballot that's printed, those protections are unable to prevent the ballot from being manipulated before it is printed, before it is encrypted ... If he had a way to prevent any sort of corruption online, he should be selling that product to the Department of Defense and to Bank of America," Greenhalgh said. "The bottom line is the internet itself is just too porous, because there's too many avenues of attack that can occur, even with the protections that the Mobile Voting Project has put in place." 

In the end, it could come down to whether enough people conclude the way voting has traditionally been is no longer working. 

"If you think about it, every major right, there's ever been one throughout history. So taking the U.S. women's rights to vote, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Ace, the Americans with Disabilities Act, same-sex marriage, the status quo didn't want to give them any of those things, right?" Tusk said. "But enough people demanded it, and enough people stood up, loud enough, long enough, that eventually the status quo had to give in."