From ‘Love Island’ to Election Day: How Close Is the U.S. to Deciding Elections by Phone?
PUBLISHED 7/10/2026 in Ms. Magazine by Siena Bannister and Vivian Rose
Millions of Americans are reminded (almost) every night by reality TV that votes can instantly be cast via phone. So why does voting in U.S. elections still require such a different—and more burdensome—process? What would it actually take to make secure mobile voting possible?
Voting on Love Island USA takes just a few taps. Could secure mobile voting ever become a reality for U.S. elections? (Peacock)
Five nights a week for the past six weeks, millions of people around the world have tuned in to watch Love Island USA. One of the biggest streaming hits in the United States, Love Island USA utilizes an app, through which American viewers are able to cast a vote in seconds and help decide who stays, who leaves and, ultimately, which couple is crowned the winner and takes home $100,000. With more than 10 million Love Island app users, according to Wired, voting by smartphone has become routine.
Yet, when Election Day arrives, Americans still stand in line, mail absentee ballots or travel to polling places. Despite using smartphones to bank, buy homes, file taxes and manage their healthcare, most still can’t use them to vote.
The contrast raises an increasingly common question: If Americans trust their phones with nearly every other aspect of life, how close are we to trusting them with democracy?
In practice, mobile voting does not usually mean casting an electoral ballot through a simple smartphone app—but could it? Most existing systems focus on remote ballot return, where voters receive, complete and submit electronic ballots through secure online platforms, by fax or via email.
For many Americans, the biggest obstacle to voting isn’t motivation—it’s logistics. Election Day is not a federal holiday in the U.S., and while some states require employers to provide time off to vote, many workers still struggle to make it to the polls because of long shifts, unpredictable schedules, childcare responsibilities, weather or environmental challenges, or lengthy commutes. Those burdens often fall disproportionately on hourly workers, single parents and communities of color, who are more likely to work jobs with less scheduling flexibility.
Mobile voting advocates argue allowing eligible voters to cast ballots securely from their phones could remove one of the most persistent barriers to participation. According to the United States Census Bureau, of the eligible 73.6 percent of American voters, only 65.3 percent actually voted in the 2024 presidential election. And in midterm, local and off-year elections, turnout is much less. “Low turnout is most pronounced in primary elections, off-year elections for state legislators and local elections,” according to data from Fair Vote. The results of a 2013 study of 340 mayoral elections indicated that many results were decided by single-digit turnout. What if these voters had the option to vote on their phone?
If electronic voting were a reality, voters could cast a ballot wherever they are: no need to take time off work, arrange childcare or travel to a polling place.
Critics, however, say convenience cannot come at the expense of election security.
Mobile Voting Already Exists—Just Not for Most Voters
While entertainment voting has normalized smartphone-based participation, political internet voting remains limited to narrow groups of voters and specific circumstances.
Internet voting, or electronic ballot return, is already used in 32 states and has allowed U.S. citizens who are overseas, part of the military or disabled to send their electronic ballots to their county by email, fax or through an online portal. Currently, less than 1 percent of Americans vote on their phones, and only a handful of states allow eligible voters to vote on the internet or by mobile app.
A woman holds a smartphone showing election results as she awaits the 2024 U.S. election vote count between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on Nov. 6, 2024. (Stefano Guidi / Getty Images)
But now, state politicians and philanthropists, like venture capitalist Bradley Tusk, are trying to make internet voting more accessible to entire municipalities. Because federal and statewide adoption remains politically controversial, many supporters have focused first on smaller-scale elections where officials can test systems and evaluate voter response.
Tusk is the founder of Mobile Voting, an online platform that has worked with various states to encourage them to use internet voting, either for municipal use or just for eligible voters under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA).
“[Mobile voting] has been attained technologically, but not politically,” Tusk told Ms. “The tech’s there, but … Unless [state] legislatures enact laws that say that people can use their phones to vote, it’s still not actually available.”
Tusk says he has been working with five Democrat-led states—Vermont, Colorado, Minnesota, Maryland and New Jersey—to enact laws in support of internet voting.
“Given that I have mainly self-funded this thing and have limited resources, I’ve got to focus on where I have the best shot,” Tusk says. “That’s right now in blue states.”
What Internet Voting Actually Means
The technology behind mobile voting no longer feels futuristic to many Americans. The question is no longer whether smartphones can collect millions of votes in real time—they already do—but whether they can do so with the level of security, transparency and public trust that democratic elections require.
The current supporters of internet voting, like Tusk, are most interested in remote ballot return by app. So far, platforms like Democracy Live, an internet voting platform that sends encrypted ballots back to voters’ counties, and online security technology like Vote Secure already exist for this purpose.
According to Democracy Live’s website, its online portal, OmniBallot, is similar to Docusign.
Susan Greenhalgh, senior advisor on election security at Free Speech for People, has studied internet voting systems for nearly 20 years and warns against widespread mobile voting usage. Otherwise, she says, elections with widespread internet votes would become untrustworthy and degrade U.S. democracy.
“Luckily the number of people that are sending ballots back over the internet has typically been small enough that it couldn’t impact the margins for elections,” Greenhalgh said. “We can [trust elections] as long as those votes are not going to change an election.”
Venture capitalist Bradley Tusk thinks otherwise.
What Love Island Gets Right—and Wrong—About Mobile Voting
The voting system on Love Island USA illustrates both the promise and the limitations of mobile voting.
Voting on the app is intentionally frictionless. Viewers can cast ballots from home within a two–and-a-half-hour voting window. Participation is high—last season, more than 3.5 million unique users cast votes during a single voting window, according to NBCUniversal, with this summer’s numbers reaching even higher— because the process is simple and accessible and results are tabulated almost instantly.
The ease of participation has also created an unexpected culture of civic-style organizing. Fans recruit friends and family who don’t even watch the show to download the app and vote, build online coalitions around their favorite contestants and produce explainer videos encouraging others to support specific couples.
“It’s a playbook of how we build campaigns, how we build coalitions,” Joy Ngugi, former director of presidential video production for the White House under President Joe Biden, told The 19th last summer. “People have created these intense coalitions. They are organizing amongst themselves … and then getting other fan bases on board with them.”
Ngugi pointed to Love Island fans recruiting K-pop fans, Swifties and members of the BeyHive to vote for contestants they had never watched. “They’re getting all these other subgroups involved into their larger coalitions,” she said. “I think that in the world of politics, we need some of that.”
Election reform advocates make a similar argument for mobile voting. For many Americans, the biggest barrier to voting is not a lack of interest but the practical burden of getting to the polls. Those challenges often fall disproportionately on lower-income workers and communities of color. Supporters of mobile voting argue that allowing eligible voters to cast a ballot securely from their phones could reduce those barriers by letting people vote wherever they are.
But cybersecurity experts say the similarities between reality television and public elections largely end there.
Unlike Love Island, where the consequence of a flawed vote is an unpopular contestant staying in the villa, public elections require voters and candidates to trust that every ballot was cast by an eligible voter, transmitted securely, counted accurately and, if necessary, audited. Those requirements create technical challenges that entertainment voting systems simply do not face.
But does that mean that we shouldn’t at least keep trying to improve the mobile voting system?
The Security Challenge
Cybersecurity experts like Greenhalgh say internet voting is not secure enough to use in elections.
For one thing, according to data from MIT, voting by internet or cellphones were some of the last reforms either political party focused on during the 2024 election.
For another, many cybersecurity experts say it’s just not a safe way to maintain our democracy.
Mobile voting doesn’t allow for much of a paper trail; meaning that as of now, there isn’t a widespread system that can ensure voter privacy, voter verification of their ballot or for election administrators to check for fraud.
Voting by internet is only one option that some states have made available for military personnel and overseas voters. The more commonplace way for these voters to cast their ballot is through the marking of an electronic ballot sent to them by email. The ballot is printed by the voter, marked and sent to the election administrator by mail.
However, internet ballots have also been used by UOCAVA voters—but how do these ballots get returned safely without interference?
This question remains as the crux of the issue for cybersecurity experts like Simons and Greenhalgh. Interference in the return of internet ballots can come in several forms, including via malware or by hackers, either domestically or internationally, though there’s no way for election administrators to verify interference.
However, those in support of internet voting, like Tusk, maintain that end-to-end verifiable voting systems (E2E-VIV) is the key to fixing the issue of security. The only downfall of that, however, is that it takes away the right of the secret ballot.
What’s Next for Future Elections?
For supporters, mobile voting represents the next step in making elections more accessible in a society that already conducts much of daily life online. For critics, elections demand a level of security and public confidence that no current internet voting system has yet demonstrated at a large scale.
Americans may already be accustomed to deciding the fate of reality television contestants from their couches. Whether they’ll someday choose presidents, governors and members of Congress the same way remains an open question—one that now depends less on whether the technology exists than on whether lawmakers, election officials and cybersecurity experts can agree it’s ready.
