TED Radio Hour - Move fast...and fix democracy?

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

It's easy to despair with another government shutdown. But this hour, three speakers argue that simple upgrades are key to restoring faith in the American experiment. Guests include venture capitalist and political consultant Bradley Tusk, political advisor Jennifer Pahlka and e-governance expert Anna Piperal.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/tedSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From Ted and NPR. I'm Manusse Zamorodi. We think of November as election season. But really, in most of the U.S., it's a year-round affair. You can pretty much put your finger on a Tuesday, and somewhere in South Carolina there's an election going on. This is Isaac Kramer. He's the director of elections for Charleston County.

South Carolina. And he says his team is laser-focused on one job. We make sure every piece of how an election is put together is done so in a way that not only is excellent, but as a way that's free and fair for all voters. So it really used to bother Isaac when he felt like he wasn't quite serving a certain group of Charleston voters. Those who live or are deployed with the military, outside of the U.S. For the longest time, Charleston mailed out a ballot to anyone overseas who requested it, and the process was slow and expensive.

But then, in 2009, those voters got a slight upgrade, the ability to scan and email back their ballot. Sounds like it would make tabulating those votes much easier. But Isaac says it actually made the process less private and more messy. So we would have on election day, just imagine this, over 2,000 sheets of paper, PDF printed out. You're taking images from across the world that's been cropped in whatever format. And sometimes we'd be like, we can't read this printed out, so we have to pull up the email. And then we have to look at the email and say, okay, yes, now we can see a little bit clearer.

But that would take a lot of man hours to duplicate. And it's like, man, there's got to be something out there that could address this problem. there has to be a better way. And it turns out there was. In 2020, South Carolina was invited to join a pilot program that would let these overseas voters cast their ballot privately on their phones. No scanning, no insecure email. Easy peasy. It's just basically the voter would log in and they would be able to make their selections digitally.

And it would look like a paper ballot. And once that voter submitted it, there was no need for them to email anything to us. The beautiful part about it is when it would come back to us, it would still keep the voters' ballot secret in a sense that we would not be able to tie that vote to you. Secure voting with the tap of a screen, voters loved it. It was amazing. I mean, they wanted this for all elections. They told us straight up. This is how we want to return our ballots.

We don't like the old way. This should be streamlined for all the future elections that we do. All that convenience also meant that many more people voted. For example, in one local primary election with the old method, about 10% of the overseas ballots were sent in by email. But a couple months later, in August, with this new voting method... By comparison, in August, we had a 55% return rate. And honestly, this has made election.

elections, 1 million percent simpler. And I think voter participation is key to the success of our democracy. And the more engaged people we have in the process, people that are voting would really be a benefit to our nation. So meeting voters where there are, I think that's a goal, right? Today, voting by phone is available in counties in 10 states for U.S. citizens who live abroad. 13 offer it for disabled residents. And after hearing Isaac's enthusiasm for it, you might be wondering, wait, why can't we all vote by phone?

Especially if it's cheaper, easier, and secure. Isn't it time for an upgrade? With another government shutdown in the headlines, it's easy to think that dysfunction is everywhere. But what if rebuilding trust in government starts closer to home by making state and local systems just work better, from voting to renewing your driver's license. Well, today on the show,

ideas from two speakers who say restoring faith in government is less about politics and more about competence. Both have spent time in Silicon Valley and public service, and they believe that if we can update our everyday systems, we could actually strengthen democracy. So in the same way that you do your banking on your phone and your health care on your phone and lock and through their love lives on their phone, mobile voting is the same thing, which is just secure technology that allows you to log in, cast your ballot,

and have it transmitted securely to the election department. And rather than you having to go to the polling place, the polling place comes to you. This is Bradley Tusk. He's devoted the last decade of his life to mobile voting. A political operative turned Silicon, Valley strategist, he's put millions of his own dollars into building voting technology and piloting it in various states where he says democracy needs it most. Yeah. So, I mean, in the presidential election, most people vote. So for someone listening to this,

this interview, two-thirds of people voted in the presidential. My guess is that probably includes you. But even the people who are listening to NPR and TED and all that kind of stuff, they probably don't have a perfect voting record when it comes to state Senate. city council, you know, municipal elections, state elections, because the truth is, we're busy, right? We have jobs. We have kids. We have lives. And, you know, a lot of places go out of their way to make it difficult to vote because they actually don't want more turnout. And so we do have a phone cell. So 97% of Americans under the age of 50 have a smartphone. 80% of Americans over the age of 65 have a smartphone. And so to offer this, it's just an additional way to vote. It doesn't replace any other form of voting, but to give people another option, I think, would allow a lot more people to easily participate in the process. And if you believe, as I do, and I've spent 35 years now

working in and around politics, that politicians make their decisions pretty much based on whatever it will help them in the next election. If the only people voting in their next election and their next primary are the extremes on either side, then that's what they are okayed or to, and that's what they will do. But if turnout goes from 15 up to 35 or 40, by definition, it forces them to the middle. It forces them to work with the other side. It forces them to get things done. So where are we now with mobile voting? Because I'm a long-time tech journalist. I know Estonia was one of the first, maybe still only places where they mobile vote. I don't know. But that's a very small country, very homogenous country. They're very, very progressive in terms of

their technology. What is the status here in the U.S.? Yes. So once we came up with the idea for mobile voting, and when I founded the mobile voting project in 2017, the first thing we did was test the hypothesis of if you put voting on people's phones, will they do it? And so we funded out of my foundation, this is solely philanthropic. Elections in seven different states were either deployed military or people with disabilities were able to vote in real elections on their phones. And what we learned is, I think, what's pretty obvious to all of us, which is, when you put things on people's phones and you make them easier, a lot more people do it. So that proved to us that, yes, it would work. Then the next question became, is the technology good enough to do this at scale? So in those pilot programs, we use the existing tech on the market. And for 5,000 soldiers in West Virginia or 6,000 people with disabilities in Oregon, that was fine. But if the goal is to get turnout from 8 to 32, you need technology that can be used at scale.

And we felt like that didn't really exist. The problem is no private company is going to spend eight figures of their own money to build new voting code and then just give it away to all their competitors by putting it up on GitHub. And so it really had to either be the government, which isn't doing it, or someone doing it philanthropically to make it happen. And I didn't see anyone else doing it, so I felt like it had to be me. So four years ago, we started building our own mobile voting technology. Bradley Tusk picks up from the TED stage.

It's going to be free and open source to any government in the world that wants to use it. And to be clear, this is just an additional way to vote. If you like voting by mail, vote by mail. If you like voting in person, great. Do that. Some people really like the ceremony that comes with going somewhere and waiting in line and all that. And if that happens to be you, knock yourself out.

But based on turnout, that's not most of you. So let's give people another option. So you can probably tell from my accent, I'm from New York, so I'm going to use that as the example for how it works. I go on the app store, and I download the New York City Board of Elections app. And the first thing they do is say, okay, is Bradley really a registered voter here in New York City? I put in my address, fine.

Next thing is multifactor authentication. So you know how like when you forget your Google password, they send your code and you put it back into the app? Same thing here. then we take a scan of your face, match that up against your government ID, and at this point we fully established, okay, Bradley is really Bradley. Ballot pops up on my screen, and the ballot itself is simple and easy to use, and I go through it, I take my time, no rush.

Whenever I'm ready, I hit submit. And when I hit submit, three things happen. First, my ballot is encrypted. Second, it's anonymized. Third, I get a tracking code like if it were a FedEx package so I can track the progress of my ballot all the way through the process. Then it goes back to the New York City Board of Elections, and they air-gap it, which means they take it offline.

And once my ballot is no longer connected to the Internet, then they decrypt it, a paper copy is printed out, that gets mixed in with all of the other ballots. I know where my ballot stands because I can see from the tracking code that it was received, tabulated, printed, and so on. And the underlying code itself is open source, which means that anyone can audit it, anyone can verify it. It's totally transparent. So you did pilots.

You're iterating on the technology. You're addressing security concerns. But you're still facing pushback from people who say secure mobile voting at scale will never be possible. And it should not even be an option. Why are some people so against it? Yeah. So there's what they will tell you the problem is and then what the problem really is. So what our opponents will tell you the problem is security.

And they will say anything can be hacked. You can't trust the Internet. You never know why risk it. So while there will be security arguments, it's really a red herring. And what most of the people who will say that really mean is the system works well for us the way it is. and we don't want things to change. And that can come from both sides of the aisle. It could come from business groups, lobbyists, unions.

There's going to be a lot of people who like their grip on power and don't want to risk it. So we are starting to work with different cities and counties around the country to allow mobile voting for local elections. And, you know, it's going to be a tough fight, but we've got to pass these laws everywhere. In a minute, more about those laws that Bradley is preparing to fight for. how his time at Uber shaped his approach to politics and why he's decided to put his own fortune into mobile voting. Today on the show, updating America's operating system. I'm Manus Shumerodi, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour.

We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti. Today on the show, updating America's operating system. Putting aside politics and making it easier for people to do just everyday things like vote. We were just talking to Bradley Tusk, the man behind the mobile voting project.

This is a nonprofit developing a way for people to vote by phone with a tap of their screen. Bradley worked for years in politics in New York City on Capitol Hill. He was even Illinois' deputy governor for a stint. He has also, more recently, sunk tens of millions of his own dollars into this project.

I don't think that I could be doing this if I hadn't had the dual experiences of first, you know, working in government for all of those years and learning how government really works. And then working, you know, with companies like Uber and learning kind of how the private sector works, it kind of fell to me to do mobile voting because I just didn't know who else would do it. And then my hope from there is that it catches on. You know, one thing I've learned in my day job as a venture capitalist is you can't put the genie back in the box. So once new tech is out there that makes people's lives better and easier, they never want to go back to the old system. I got started with all of this. And the reason that I was able to afford all of this is I started working in tech for Uber and I ran most of the campaigns around the U.S. to legalize Uber. And the reason we won, because even though we were a tiny tech startup at the time, we were able to let our customers know that if you wanted this Uber thing to stick around, you had to let your elected officials know.

that and we built the functionality into the app. Millions of people ultimately told there city council members, mayor, state legislators, whoever was needed, hey, I like the super thing. Please leave it alone. And we won in every single market in the country. And so, you know, my hope is that the same thing will prove true here as well, which is when you give people a better way to do something, they will demand it. And my hope is that over the next couple of years, we can pass bills to legalize this in a couple of dozen cities, states, counties around the country, start showing that it works, and then hopefully from there it can get some momentum and keeps growing.

The way that you described it was that the people had their voice heard and decided that they wanted Uber to come into their city. But there are other people who tell a very different story, which was that Uber used tactics to, A, not follow laws and sort of asked for forgiveness later that, a lot of rides were made so incredibly cheap that for some people, they ended up creating a habit of using Uber as opposed to putting their money into public infrastructure and transportation and that you guys were sort of bullies and you strong-armed the city into getting into Uber. And then before we knew it, here we are. You know, if you call the activating the voters and the constituents to express their opinion bullying,

then sure, I think we were guilty of that. But what did we do? We won, you're right. We didn't ask for permission because the taxi industry was so politically powerful. And so they had so many politicians all over the country in their pocket that there was no way to just ask politely and be told, yeah, we love competition. We want to see a better product on the market. Come right in.

So we launched. Uber will not have grown from a tiny tech startup back then to what it is today if there wasn't massive market demand for a better product. The taxi industry for decades and decades was lazy and corrupt. And so, you know, if something comes along and can perform better and give people a better service, like government shouldn't exist for the benefit of the entrenched interest in the status quo, whether it's the transit systems or the taxi industry or anything else, should exist for the best interest of its constituents.

And if those best interests are served by trying something totally different and new, then that's what we should do. So we talked to Susan Sweena. She's president of the nonprofit U.S. Vote Foundation. And they work to support voting efforts to make voting easier. And she is a huge skeptic, Bradley. She says that even if online voting can be done safely, she says she doesn't think there's any appetite for this,

that already the Trump administration is attacking mail-in voting and absentee voting. The idea that mobile voting would somehow work without causing real questions or disagreements about whether a vote was valid or not and potentially plunge the whole situation into chaos, I think makes her very nervous. Sure. I can appreciate that. I mean, luckily, Trump can say he wants to get rid of mail and voting. He can say whatever he wants. He doesn't have it. any authority over it either way. So I'd say that's number one. Number two, we have a country that is broken. We have a government that is totally dysfunctional. We have a society that we are the richest country in the history of the world with a 24th in the World Happenance report because people feel

so awful about the way everything is going. I don't think we will be one country in 20 years or maybe even less if we don't find a way to fundamentally change the way we vote to bring. more people into the system and take power away from the extremes. And so I'm sure, I don't know, Susan, but I'm sure she means really well. But to me, she's just throwing in the towel. So tell me in an ideal world, and you know, you're a very optimistic guy that this can be fixed, but tell me in an ideal world how you see this rolling out over the next, say, five to ten years. Yeah, it's starting at the municipal level. And so we have to start by passing laws in different. that would allow mobile voting to even exist. And once we do that in 2026, 2027, we can start to have elections where people can vote in local elections on their phones.

Is the tech ready for that in this scenario? Yes. Yeah. The tech will be fully posted, including all of the code and all of the documentation, to get Hubb by mid-December. And cryptographers presumably will take their crack at trying to break it. Yeah. And we've been doing that all throughout. So we've been doing all kinds of different.

You know, chaos monkey situations and hacking it and everything else, you know, the whole time. And by the way, part of the reason to make it open source is so the people can improve upon it, right? This is, you know, I'm not the keeper of America's democracy. So, you know, if other people can contribute, that would be great. I would love that. If you have a way to take the tech and make it even better, fantastic. And with a little more work, I think we could do even more. We could register people to vote on the app.

We could give voters nonpartisan information about candidates or ballot measures so you actually know what you're voting on. And versions of this already do exist. Mobile voting in a way exists in Estonia. They use in party elections in the UK. Some municipalities here in Canada use it, but not in the U.S. and not in most democracies. And that's where the hard part really kicks in. Getting politicians to let us use our phones to vote in elections.

because in my experience, people in power don't like making it easier for other people to gain power. And that's, yeah, exactly. And that's why I'm here, because they're not just going to do it if I ask nicely. They're not just going to do it if I snarl with libertarians on X or at the liberals on blue sky. They're only going to do it if you make it happen, if we all make it happen. And we can. Is it fair to call what you're doing just in tech parlance a moonshot for democracy? I like to think that our odds are a little better than a moot shot at this point.

You know, we've now run elections in seven states, 21 different jurisdictions. We've built really unique secure technology. We are working with local governments right now around the country who are interested in trying this thing out. And so I think we're closer than that. But yeah, I mean, this is a big, idea that is really ambitious and I would say, and I've had a lot of hard jobs over the years, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. Yeah.

Can you keep, this could take like the rest of your life, Bradley, no? Yeah. It might. I hope it doesn't, but it might. Here's what I've had to learn and this was not sort of natural for my personality, which is I tend to be very results oriented and I feel good when the thing is done, when it's accomplish. I can check it off the list. And because mobile voting is so hard and it's going to take so long, I have to let myself feel good about the process instead. But yeah, it's hard for sure.

But at the end of the day, like, you know, look, I was a really weird. This is now way too personal for this interview. But like, I was a weird kid when I was growing up. I was a misfit and I just didn't really ever fit in anywhere. And, you know, to me, I just always, you know, I just always, knew that I wanted my life to have impact, to have meaning. I don't even know if I knew what that was. I didn't want to just kind of live, have a normal life and die, and that was it. And so to me, you know, trying to do things that are moonshots have always made sense because it's sort of the only way that my mind has ever worked. And, you know, I don't know if I'm going to succeed with mobile voting or not. And it is maybe a little crazy that just one totally random guy is just taking

this thing on when it should really be the responsibility. of the government, quite frankly. But our government doesn't try to make voting easier. In fact, they frequently try to make it harder. And someone's got to do it. And so I'm willing to try. That was Bradley Tusk. He's the head of Tusk Ventures and Tusk Philanthropies.

To get the latest on the mobile voting project, you can go to mobilevoting.org. And you can see Bradley's full talk at ted.com. On the show today, how upgrading the way our government works could actually strengthen democracy. Because sometimes you want to put aside politics and just renew your driver's license or get to work on time or sign up for health insurance. That was nearly impossible to do in 2013 when the then new platform called healthcare.gov launched. The online system has been overloaded since October 1st when the exchange is open. A series of glitches, delays, and crashes kept people from getting to state exchanges as well. Obama acknowledged some early hiccups with the government's website.

How did it gov was an enormous, enormous task. This is Jennifer Polka. She had just joined the Obama administration as the deputy chief technology officer when the launch happened. The policy was enormously complex. They had to serve really every possible. person who would be looking for health care insurance. Affordances for folks who are gig workers. And then for those who have special status or special needs, it wasn't really supposed to be

for non-citizens, but there were actually exceptions to that that got to like very, very small groups of people. And to get to that, you had to code in a lot of really specific logic to be able to just redo that flow. It was complicated. It was really complicated. But there were some people. behind the scenes saying, look, could we do what you'd call a soft launch that just works for

like the easiest folks and then work out the bugs with them and then add the other people's needs in? And of course, what they got back was you can't do that. It would have been a very different experience had they been allowed to do a soft launch and have it grow in its functionality over time. I think the concern there that say, gig worker, for instance, they'd be able to access it later than the other people is certainly a valid concern. You can add those people a month or two later or three months later, depending on how long it's going to take you to work out these bugs. And the reality is that those people actually could not access the site in the way that they did it.

And so there's this sort of false sense of tradeoffs. We've got to have it work for everybody from day one, when in fact that tactic means that it will work for almost no one on day one. Within a few months, Jen's team got health care.gov back on track. And Jen, along with many others, said about bringing a more digital mindset to government. Because before the White House, Jen had worked in Silicon Valley and then launched a nonprofit called Code for America in 2009. From her perspective, marrying the new digital ways of doing things with old school bureaucracy presented a huge opportunity. She talked about it back in 2012 on the TED stage.

I started a program to try to get the rock star tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they're supposed to hate. We have them work in government. The program is called Code for America, and it's a little bit like a Peace Corps for geeks. We select a few fellows every year, and we send them into the wilds of City Hall. And there they make great apps. they work with city staffers, but really what they're doing is they're showing what's possible with technology today. I think we can't emphasize enough how much there was a change in thinking at that point around then of 2012.

I think is when the lean startup by Eric Reese became sort of the Bible of Silicon Valley, which was a completely different way of approaching how you built a company, how you problem to solve. For folks who maybe aren't familiar with the lean startup, you start small, you try, you see what works, you pivot in the lingo. That's become a bit of a cliche now. But at the time, it was kind of radical, right? And I assume that when you first got to Washington, that lingo was not common at all. Oh, I think it's still not very common, or at least not as common as it should be. But it is gaining more traction, this idea that if you have the right people in house, and you're really focused on the people who need to use the service and their experience of it.

it, then you're going to be able to follow your way. Yes, pivot. Though it is a cliche, pivot your way to something that works, but it's very hard for government not necessarily to adopt the technology. It's hard for government to adopt the ways of working that make that technology have a big impact. If you think about who goes into government, it's lawyers and economists and administrators, very much people with sort of a certain way of thinking about the world. I mean, I talk to people all the time in government who are planning things for 2035, you know. It's like, what is the world even going to look like in 2035? So before we go into the future, Jen, can we talk about another more recent fiasco?

In 2020, Congress passed a lot to make it easier for hopeful college students to fill out a form to get a loan. It's called the free application for federal student aid or FAFSA. But that upgrade, it did not. go as hope. Was this just health care.gov all over again, or were there lessons learned this time? Unfortunately, the better FAFSA kicked off what is known in government technology world as a modernization, and I say that with heavy air quotes around it. And that modernization process resulted in a new system that did not work and was absolutely terrible for millions of young people who needed to be able to apply for financial aid and really just couldn't because the system wasn't working.

And, you know, in sort of much the way that health care.gov didn't work. The good news, though, is that the Department of Education brought in some people to help out, a team from the United States Digital Service and an outside team from the college board, both of whom practice in a really different model. It's what we call the product model. And the FAFSA this year has worked quite well. People are very satisfied with it. as high marks. According to Jen, this rescue team, including the U.S. Digital Service, which she had

helped found, dug in with more of a digital approach. They worked nonstop to find bugs, beta-tested new features, and fixed the problems fast. They sort of brought this lean startup thinking to the rescue effort. But ironically, this team ended up getting in big trouble. In the midst of this great success, the government accountability office writes a letter saying, hey, the FAFSA team isn't doing things by the books. And so you're in trouble. They wrote a 60-page, you know, slap on the wrist, essentially. The rebellious better FAFSA team refused to accept their reprimand

and said, yeah, we're doing things by a different book. We automated a lot of the testing so that the parts that computers could do, they could just do quickly, and the parts where we really needed people on it watching humans, you know, struggle, they would do their part right. They're actually spending less and getting better outcomes now, but they caught this nasty gram from the GAO because the GAO is holding them accountable to the old way of working. When we come back with shutdowns and layoffs in Washington, Jennifer Polka explains how states are stepping in and how we can bring bureaucracy safely into the AI age.

On the show today, updating America's operating system. I'm Anish Zamoroti. And you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamorodi. Today on the show, giving the government a digital upgrade and how it could actually strengthen democracy.

We've been talking to Jennifer Polka, founder of Code for America, and former Deputy Chief Technology Officer with the Obama administration. She thinks the government can be smaller and smarter, even though between federal shutdowns and sweeping layoffs, it's hard to imagine what a smaller, faster, more capable government might look like. One of the things that has happened very recently is the sense that people are like, fine, forget it.

It's not working. Let's start all over. I'm thinking of Elon Musk, his Department of Government Efficiency, and say what you will. about what he did, but one thing he definitely do was shock the system. Elon delivered a colossal change in the old ways of doing business in Washington. And I wonder if sometimes

that's what it takes when things are so entrenched that people think a very certain way. They are scared to make changes. They're scared to iterate. They're scared to fail, frankly. And maybe were you hopeful, actually, when Doge came on the scene?

I was hopeful. and I know many other people who were. I think Doge cut the workforce but didn't really cut the work that needed doing. We have so many policies and procedures that have accumulated just like layers of croft over decades and decades that, unfortunately, public servants are still stuck doing those things that aren't the core work that they want to do. Public servants want to serve the public for the most part. and we really need to free them to do the work that most gets the outcomes that the public expects. So just cutting the people but not actually reducing that decades of procedural bloat isn't really what I was hoping to have happen.

But that's the reality we live in today. There has been a shock to the system. So what do we do with it? You can't want really transformational change and then think it's going to happen without anybody, ever getting upset about anything, right? They always say, right, you're going to have to break a few eggs to make the omelet. Kind of where I think of us right now as is like the eggs have been broken, whether you like how they were broken or not. And it's up to us now to make the omelet. What do you think it is that makes people struggle to do things differently? Is it a

matter of simply a generation that we get stuck in our ways, that young people in fresh blood and different perspectives, what do you think it is that keeps government from keeping up? There are a lot of reasons that it's hard to move this. The one I would point to right now just because it seems so timely is that people don't like the idea of just getting rid of the old. They need to be able to envision what the new thing is that they're moving to. Mostly people kind of want a lot of the same things, right? We want better schools. We want better roads.

We want to feel safe and secure as a nation in the world. So we look to the policies that we think drive those better outcomes. But we've been doing a lot of policy work, and we're not getting those better schools. Jen says following four rules can bring the government up to speed. First, we need the right people in government. which means we probably need some sort of civil service reform so that our systems get us and retain and develop the right people. Second, those people can't be stuck dealing with red tape.

We need them focused on the right work. So there needs to be some procedural reform to right size all of that procedure that people are stuck with. Third, you need those right people doing the right tasks with tech that actually works. They need purpose-fit systems. We have to find better ways to. build and buy the technology that runs our government. And finally, they need to be able to test, learn, and pivot so they can actually achieve their goals.

Once we see that that foundational work needs to be done, and this is the perfect time to do it, then I think people start to get, I know where we're going, let's all go there together. I guess what I'm concerned about is like all this bureaucracy you've been talking about as the biggest barrier to an effective government, but many people would say those bureaucratic rules were created by political choices. How do you separate the two? Immediately it becomes a telegraphing or a signaling of what you believe is right or who you hate in some cases. I think there's so much more of this that isn't polarized. We have always added and added and added to our laws and polis and regulations. From the left, right, and the center and from the best of intentions, and we never subtract. So, again, I give me an example, people were outraged at how many states accrued backlogs of unemployment insurance claims during

the pandemic. We had people waiting months for their benefits, and that's not okay. When someone's out of work and has no money for food, we have an obligation to get them that money, and yet we weren't. And one of the state labor commissioners, a guy named Rob Osaro Angelo, in New Jersey, when he was called to testify about why that state had a backlog, he brought these huge boxes and put them on the table in front of the state legislature. We're forced to go through a gauntlet of federal requirements before paying out claims. Federal rules and regulations have changed about 30 times just in the past two years. For New Jerseyans who found themselves out of work after COVID hit,

these are all the unemployment regulations they had to weigh through. And quite the de facto of the Democrats had said 7,190. 19 pages of active UI regulations in our state. It's like if you want the system to be able to scale up to 10 or even 15 times the volume overnight, you need something that is just a lot more streamlined and simple and clear. You can't just always add to the regulations and never go back and simplify and sort of rationalize them. I can imagine someone saying like, we need checks and balances. Government requires over. The stakes are too high not to get into the details. What do you say to someone who's worried about people, well, moving fast and breaking things? I 100% agree that we need checks and balances. I think the question is, do we need 7,119 pages of them in just one program in just one state? This is not a call for deregulation in that sense or no regulation or just to sort of go willy-nilly. But it is a wake-up call, I think, that we need to make choices that additional rules and regulations don't come without a cost. We've really got to. of the point where it's almost impossible to understand how you would create a set of rules that would govern that system that would be, you know, scalable and robust, except now we have

AI that can help you get through 7,119 pages of regulation. So that's another reason where, like, this is the right moment to be doing this work. So let's talk about that. I read an op-ed you wrote for the New York Times, which said that New Jersey is actually kind of becoming a model of smart, safe AI use in government, that it trained more than 14,000 employees to use some tools more efficiently. Tell me about what you are seeing about AI working in government, because I think it scares a lot of people, frankly. I think people get scared when they think about AI making decisions that people should make.

And the greatest use, you know, of AI are to help people make decisions and to help people do their work faster. So in New Jersey, they've said our public servants really can do a better job with AI in their hands. So not only have they made sure that people have access to models that are appropriate, but they've also been training them at how they could use these tools to do their jobs better. And I don't think that's as scary if there's a human in the loop. In many cases, folks are worried about AIs making decisions that encode bias, and I think we need to take that very, very seriously. I also think we need to remember that the status quo is that people are making those decisions with a lot of bias, even despite all the rules and regulations that have come into place.

And so let's not compare a system that may make some mistakes to a theoretical perfect system because that is not the system that we have. Do we want AI helping us go through literally thousands of pages of regulations and saying, where might we make this program a little bit easier to administer? Yes, we're still in charge. Guess what? You can't let AI make a decision about turning back law or policy regulation because by law, that has to be done by the legislature or the regulator. I mean, I can also assume that there's so much busy work that happens, that that's where a lot of the backlogs are.

And nobody really wants to do that stuff. How do you begin to think of jobs and the role of the humans in the government system, whether that's in, you know, local government, state or federal? There are a lot of people doing a lot of work that computers could do better. And that wouldn't be a problem necessarily if you didn't have a lot more demand coming from the public for the state to do. stuff, right? So we're about to enter an era where states are going to have real budget crises. If you say, and AI cannot play a role in this, the people that is going to hurt are the public. You also have enormous staff shortages at the state and local level that are talked about much, much less than, you know, the shortages that we have now in federal government for a different reason.

So we need people in the public sector. You could be moved. moving people into the jobs that aren't being done. But we're going to have to make some choices here. And I really hope that our leaders in state and local government in particular decide to be thoughtful about how to adopt AI in such a way that we meet the needs of the public first. I have to say, I renewed my passport for the first time online, and it was awesome. I am so glad to hear that. I can tell you that until I guess it was last year,

You couldn't renew your passport online, but a fantastic team from the United States Digital Service went and worked with the Bureau of Consular Affairs and helped them really move their model of working into this product model. They brought in the right people and the right approaches. And I think you have them to thank for a much improved experience. I mean, I remember just a few years ago renewing my kids' passports. we still had to go somewhere to get our pictures taken. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is so archaic and ridiculous. But this time, it was like, upload a new picture. And I was like, oh, no, what am I going to do?

And it was like, just stand against a white backdrop and take a selfie. And I did. I did it in my hallway, loaded it up. It was like, great, you're all set. I was like, what? Magic. It feels like magic when it works, but it's not. It's groups of people figuring out the kinks and making it work.

Yeah. and challenging the notion that the way government has always done it is the way we need to do it today. That was Jennifer Polka. She's the board chair of the Recoding America Fund and a senior fellow at the Niscannon Center. Her book is called Recoding America, why government is failing in the digital age and how we can do better. You can see her full talk at TED.com. We've talked a lot this hour about upgrading Americas, operating system. But there's one place that we mention that is way ahead of the digital curve,

Estonia. So we want to end with an expert on e-governance there. Here's Anna Paperel on the TED stage in 2019. Almost 30 years ago, my country was facing the need to rebuild everything from scratch. After years of Soviet occupation, Estonia regained its independence, but we were left with nothing. no infrastructure, no administration, no legal code, an organizational chaos. Out of necessity, the state leaders back then had to make some daring choices. There was a lot of experimentation and uncertainty, but also a bit of luck involved, particularly in the fact that we could count on a number of brilliant visionaries, cryptographers, and engineers.

I was just a kid back then. Today, we are called the most digital society on Earth. I'm from Estonia, and we've been declaring taxes online since 2001. We've been using digital identity and signature since 2002. We've been voting online since 2005, and for today, pretty much the whole range of the public services that you can imagine, education, police, justice, starting a company, applying for benefits, looking at your health record, or challenging a parking ticket.

That's everything that is done online. In fact, it's much easier to tell you what are the free things we cannot yet do online. We have to show up to pick up our ID documents, get married or divorced, or sell real estate. That's pretty much it. Indeed, one of the features of the modern life that has no reason to exist anymore, during technological possibilities of today, is the labyrinth of bureaucracy. The central idea behind this development

is transformation of the state role and digitalization of trust. Think about it. In most countries, people don't trust their governments, and the governments don't trust them back. And all the complicated paper-based formal procedures are supposed to solve that problem, except that they don't.

They just make life more complicated. I believe Estonian experience is showing that technology can be the remedy for getting the trust back while creating an efficient, user-centric service delivery system that actively responds to citizens' needs. Now, of course, running a digital society with no paper backup can be an issue, right? even though we trust our systems to be solid,

but one can never be too cautious as we experienced back in 2007 when the first cyber incident happened, and it literally blocked part of our networks making access to the services impossible for ours. We survived, but this event put cybersecurity at the very top of agenda. So how do you back up a countrywide system

Well, for instance, you can export copy of the data outside the country territory. So today, we have data embassies that are holding of the most critical digital assets of Estonia, guaranteeing continuity of operations. The Estonian system is location-independent and user-centric. It prioritizes inclusiveness, openness and reliability. It puts security and transparency at its center and the data into the hands of the rightful owner, the person they refer to. Don't take my word for it. Try it.

Thank you. That was e-governance expert Anna Paperel. You can see her full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show today. If you liked it, learn something. Please leave us a rating or a review on that. Spotify or Apple. We read all your comments and we love hearing from you. This episode was produced by James Delahousie, Phoebe Lett, Katie Montalione, and Fiona Garan. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkampur and

me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White, Matthew Cloutier, and Harsha Nihada. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were David Greenberg and Zoe Vangenhoven. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at 10 are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Highlash, and Danielle Ballarezzo. I'm Manoosh Zamorodi, and you have been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.