Harris campaign chief of staff promoted voting by mobile devices, despite election security concerns

The chief of staff for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign promoted mobile (online) voting while heading up an organization that advocated for it. However, online voting has repeatedly been found to not be secure enough for widespread voting.

Sheila Nix, Harris’ campaign’s chief of staff, once led an organization that pushes for mobile voting. The organization was co-founded by another former deputy governor who worked for former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D). Nix promoted mobile voting, which the organization's co-founder discovered is still not secure, even after allowing a state to use it in midterm elections. 

Nix is well embedded in the Democratic party machine. She was deputy governor from 2004 to 2008 for Blagojevich, who was later impeached and removed from office and convicted of federal corruption charges, a position that is not mentioned on her LinkedIn account. She also served as chief of staff for Biden during the 2012 presidential campaign for then-President Barack Obama, then became chief of staff to then-second lady Jill Biden during the Obama administration's second term, before being a senior adviser for Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to LinkedIn. From January 2021 to July 2023, Nix was chief of staff at the U.S Department of Education.

During the Trump administration, Nix was president of Tusk Montgomery Philanthropies from April 2017 to January 2021, according to her LinkedIn. Tusk Montgomery Philanthropies, which is now just called Tusk Philanthropies, was co-founded by Bradley Tusk, who was Uber's first political adviser and a former staffer for both Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Tusk was also a former deputy governor of Illinois and served under Blagojevich before testifying against him.

In a September 2017 opinion piece that Nix wrote with Tusk for the Observer, they said that mobile voting would help increase voter turnout.

“[W]hen it comes to the act that fundamentally maintains our democracy, we toss aside the object we rely on most and revert to an outdated, difficult approach,” Nix and Tusk wrote. “Voting requires taking time off work or finding childcare, identifying your polling place, finding time to go there, waiting in line, dealing with confused/hostile people working at the polling place, and then driving or walking back to wherever you started. Not surprisingly, few people bother. The solution is simple: If we want more people to vote, we have to make it easier to do so. If voting requires just opening an app, a lot more people will do it.”

Regarding the security of online voting, Nix and Tusk proposed using blockchain.

“Mobile voting has to be secure to preserve the secrecy of the ballot. It also has to be auditable and ensure the person voting is who they say they are,” they wrote. “Those who like the status quo—in other words, every current politician, interest group, union, major donor, think tank, and anyone else who wants to maintain their power—will raise a host of objections to mobile voting, starting with security. Blockchain and authentication software may be the solution to this, and blockchain voting startups like Voatz are promising.”

The co-authors also said that Big Tech companies could encourage social media and smartphone users to vote.

“Due to the advent of early voting in most jurisdictions, election day is no longer a one-day event. If voters had a week, two weeks or a month to cast a vote on their phone, participation would be much higher,” Nix and Tusk added. “And if every major social platform—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, as well as the devices themselves (iOS, Android)—reminded users to vote, participation would rise even higher. Getting buy-ins from the platforms and devices is critical.”

Nix and Tusk were successful in getting one state to use a mobile voting app in the 2018 midterm elections.

In 2018, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner (R) announced that for 24 of the state’s counties, ​Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA​) voters would “have the option to vote on their cell phone or mobile tablet” in that year’s general election. Tusk Montgomery Philanthropies connected the state with Voatz, which created the mobile voting app. 

The Harris campaign declined to respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Half of states are currently using online voting for overseas voters.

Twenty-five​ states and Washington, D.C., allow ​UOCAVA​ voters to return completed absentee ballots by email, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Ten ​​states allow ​UOCAVA​ voters to return absentee ballots through an online portal.

Tusk funded a working group of computer security professors and professionals who met at the University of California Berkeley in 2021 to create a set of standards for ballots to be securely sent online, NPR reported last September. The group met consistently for more than a year and concluded that voting securely online is not currently possible.

“The Working Group concludes that the current cybersecurity environment and state of technology make it infeasible for the Working Group to draft responsible standards to support the use of internet ballot return in U.S. public elections at this time,” the group wrote in their December 2022 report.

“Implementing widespread adoption of secure and accessible internet ballot return requires technologies that do not currently exist and others that have not been fully tested,” the group added.

One of the differences with voting online, compared to other online transactions, is that “Voters should not be able to reveal their votes – even if they wish to do so. The ability to disclose a vote would enable vote-selling and coercion. Voters therefore cannot confirm that their votes have been correctly recorded and counted in the same way that they verify bank statements and online purchases,” the working group noted.

"Basically every election security expert agrees that we should not have lots of people voting over the internet," William Adler, the senior elections technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told NPR last year. "There's really more agreement on this point than almost anything else in election security."

In 2022, a bill was introduced in the D.C. Council that would have allowed residents of the nation's capital to vote from their electronic devices. However, in 2010, D.C. election officials invited security researchers and analysts to attempt to hack into a voting portal the district had created for overseas voters. That exercise ended with hackers quickly infiltrating the site and election officials not noticing for days.