Why America can’t get more gun-safety progress
After the dual disastrous decisions by the Supreme Court — overturning Roe v. Wade and striking down New York State’s concealed carry law — the torrent began again. Friends asking what to do about the gun epidemic. Colleagues suggesting different types of social media or celebrity campaigns to elect pro-choice Republicans. Business partners finally realizing that elections matter, that the court is just a manifestation of who controls the White House at the right time.
All these people mean well. All of them are smart, creative, and thoughtful. But none of their ideas will solve the problem.
In the decades I’ve spent working in politics, I’ve come away with one key realization: Every policy output is shaped by a political input. Every elected official prioritizes staying in office more than any policy, which means they will never sacrifice their own self-interest to do the right thing.
We have abysmal gun laws in this country because we’re using the wrong political inputs. In the United States, most legislative districts are gerrymandered, meaning the only elections that matter are the primaries, where the most ideological voters and special interests, who don’t want compromise or consensus, take control.
On the right, primary voters are heavily pro-gun. They do not want background checks. They do not want an assault weapons ban. They believe strongly that the Second Amendment guarantees pretty much every American the right to own and carry a gun. Period. That’s why they challenged New York’s ban on concealed carry.
But if you look at polling on guns across all voters, most think it should be harder than it is to buy a semiautomatic rifle. And most voters don’t think we should confiscate guns from people’s homes either. But that 70% doesn’t matter because they don’t bother to vote in primaries. The only input GOP electeds have on this is the 15% hardcore gun advocates. Defying them means losing the next election.
The exact same is true on abortion. According to the latest Gallup poll, 85% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances. But the two dozen states about to ban abortion completely don’t care about the views of the nation as a whole or even the people in their district as a whole. They care about not having a challenge from the right in their next primary. High ideological voters are the only ones who consistently bother to vote, so no one else matters.
So how do we change that? I believe the best and only way is mobile voting. We do everything on our phones already — banking, shopping, health care, our love lives and so on. But we can’t vote on our phones. This isn’t because the technology doesn’t exist. This isn’t because the idea has been thoughtfully studied and rejected. It’s because virtually no one in power wants to make it easier to lose power. And that comes before anything and everything, including protecting kids from slaughter.
When I ran many of the campaigns to legalize Uber and ridesharing a decade ago, we beat a very muscular taxi industry because we were able to use the app to mobilize our customers. Over a period of a few years, several million people emailed, texted, tweeted, called or in some way, all prompted by the app, their elected officials that they wanted ridesharing. Those numbers were so overwhelming that the political input had clearly changed and the smart move for any elected official was to support Uber and follow what their constituents said.
When that happened, it hit me that if we could let people vote this way, we could exponentially increase turnout. And if we can do that, we can change the political inputs and make ideas like banning assault weapons or codifying abortion rights nationally politically feasible. Over the last four years, the mobile voting project (which, full disclosure, is funded and run by my foundation) has funded elections in seven different states where either deployed military, people with disabilities or both were able to vote in real elections on their phone. All 21 elections were independently audited. All came back clean. Turnout, on average, doubled.
To address complaints from the cybersecurity community, we started building our own mobile voting technology last year. Once we’re finished building it, it will be free and open-sourced to any government who wants to use it.
This is the only way to change the political inputs, and therefore, the only way to stop mass shootings, to protect a woman’s right to choose, to implement solutions to problems ranging from immigration to opioids, health care to education, climate change to infrastructure. The political status quo — in both parties — will do anything they can to stop it, which is perhaps exactly why we need to embrace mobile voting for all.