Alaska will allow voters to vote via cell phone for the first time in a municipal election. The city of Anchorage, the largest in the state, will launch a pilot digital voting project in April 2026 that will allow residents to send their votes through a secure link on their smartphones, according to a report published this Thursday (13) by the newspaper The New York Times.
The initiative, unprecedented in the United States, will be tested at this time only in the municipal dispute and will not apply to state or federal elections. The objective, as explained by electoral authorities in Anchorage, is to expand access to voting in a state marked by long distances, harsh weather and a highly mobile population, made up of military personnel, oil, fishing and tourism workers.
The system will be implemented in partnership with the Mobile Voting Project, an open source platform funded by investor and former advisor to Michael Bloomberg, Bradley Tusk. According to the businessman, the project uses multifactor authentication and biometric recognition, making the process “exponentially safer than any other current verification method”, he said in an interview with CBS Newscited by NewsNation.
According to the The New York Timesthe system will automatically print a physical copy of the votes received, creating a verifiable audit trail. In this model, the digital vote sent by cell phone is not counted electronically: an election official prints each ballot and includes it in the manual count, ensuring that the official count is based on paper votes, and not digital records. The measure seeks to combine the practicality of mobile voting with the traditional security of physical voting.
O The Times highlighted that Alaska faces unique challenges in maintaining voter turnout: Many mail-in ballots arrive late or are never delivered. Cell phone voting, according to local authorities, could reduce such logistical failures.
Election security experts warn of the risks of voting via cell phone. David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told Times that “it is a politically delicate moment to test internet voting”, amid distrust about the integrity of the elections.
Even so, Anchorage is betting that the project can serve as a model for other American cities. According to the organizers, the system will be made available free of charge to other municipalities interested in testing it in the future.
