Moonshot!

I want to talk about something that keeps coming up in these interviews I’m doing.

Voting.

More specifically, why in the hell is it still so difficult to vote?

Think about the world we live in.

For more than 20 years, I’ve been banking on the internet.

I pay the IRS on the internet.

I’ve signed legal documents on the internet.

I’ve done paperwork for houses on the internet.

I’ve bought things from complete strangers on the internet and sent money halfway around the world.

We manage enormous parts of our lives through a phone that’s sitting in our pocket.

But when I say, “Why can’t I vote securely on the internet?”

Suddenly everybody becomes Amish.

“Ohhhh, John. Technology. That’s dangerous.”

Of course it’s dangerous.

Nothing on the internet is 100% secure.

That’s not the question.

The question is: Can we make it secure enough, verifiable enough, and auditable enough that Americans can trust it?

I believe we can.

And I think America should make it a national moonshot.

Remember what a moonshot actually means.

When President Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon, we didn’t already know how to do everything required to get there.

That was the point.

We had a destination.

We had a deadline.

We assembled incredibly talented people, gave them resources, and said:

Figure it out.

And they did.

So let’s do it again.

Let’s bring together the brightest minds in cybersecurity, encryption, artificial intelligence, election administration, computer science—and yes, bring in the skeptics too.

Especially the skeptics.

Give them one mission:

Build the safest, most transparent, most auditable voting system in the world.

Then don’t just tell us it’s safe.

Prove it.

Build it.

Test it.

Attack it.

Try to hack it.

Try to corrupt it.

Try to break it.

Find every weakness you possibly can.

Fix them.

Then attack the damn thing again.

And don’t roll it out nationally until it meets an extraordinarily high standard.

Here’s what I envision.

Election Day becomes an election period.

For 24 hours, wherever you are in the world, you can securely cast your ballot.

You’re in Greensboro? Vote.

You’re traveling in California? Vote.

You’re stationed overseas with the military? Vote.

You’re working a twelve-hour shift? Vote when you get home.

You’re taking care of your kids? Vote from home.

The system identifies the appropriate ballot and routes your vote to the proper jurisdiction.

And then we build redundancy into the system.

There should be a voter-verifiable record.

There should be an independently auditable record.

There should be a physical paper trail available for recounts and audits.

And the electronic record should be designed so attempts to alter it can be detected.

People keep talking to me about blockchain.

Maybe blockchain is part of the answer.

Maybe it isn’t.

I don’t care what the technology is called.

I care whether it works.

This isn’t about falling in love with some buzzword.

It’s about solving the problem.

Because underneath all this technology is a much bigger question:

What kind of democracy do we want?

Do we want a democracy that makes participation difficult?

Or one that says:

“We want you involved.”

That’s really what the Truth Party is about.

I’m trying to turn spectators into citizens.

And if we actually mean that, then we’ve got to stop putting unnecessary obstacles between citizens and the ballot box.

Voting should be secure.

Voting should be private.

Voting should be verifiable.

Voting should be auditable.

And voting should be easy.

Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

And imagine what happens if we get this right.

Instead of arguing every election about who can vote, where they can vote, how long the lines are, whether somebody can get off work, whether their polling place moved, whether they’re traveling—

we start asking a completely different question:

What do you believe in?

Now we’re talking about issues.

Now we’re talking about candidates.

Now we’re talking about the future of the country.

That’s democracy.

And here’s the part I love.

Every time I explain this idea to somebody in these interviews, the conversation gets interesting.

Because people understand the basic premise immediately.

They look at everything else they already do electronically and ask the obvious question:

Why haven’t we seriously tried to solve this?

That’s exactly the question America should be asking.

Not:

“Can you guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong?”

Nobody can guarantee that.

Instead:

“Can we collectively focus our intelligence, technology, money and ingenuity on making this extraordinarily secure?”

Hell yes, we can try.

We’re the country that put people on the moon.

We built the interstate highway system.

We built technologies that connected billions of people around the planet.

And now we’ve got artificial intelligence and computing power that previous generations couldn’t have imagined.

So let’s aim some of that brilliance at democracy.

Let’s make secure, accessible voting a national project.

A Voting Moonshot.

Build it.

Test it.

Attack it.

Break it.

Fix it.

Test it again.

And when we’ve proven it’s ready—

give the ballot box to every American, wherever they happen to be.

Because the destination this time isn’t the moon.

The destination is democracy.