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Vote swapping, also called co-voting or vote pairing or vote trading, is an informal strategic agreement between two voters to "exchange" their votes, in order to Tactical voting and maximize the chances that their preferred candidates will win election. Vote swapping avoids Wasted vote (and the "spoiler effect") by shifting votes from uncompetitive districts to competitive districts.
In a vote swapping agreement, Voter 1 in District A commits to vote for Voter 2's preferred candidate in District A, and Voter 2 in District B commits to vote for Voter 1's preferred candidate in District B.
For example, consider elections in the United Kingdom: In constituency A, the race is tight between a Labour and a Conservative candidate. In constituency B, the race is tight between a Liberal Democrat and a Conservative candidate. A Liberal Democrat voter in constituency A would agree to vote Labour, and in exchange, a Labour voter in constituency B would agree to vote Liberal Democrat. This makes it more likely for either Labour or the Liberal Democrats to win that seat from the Conservatives.
In the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, the process has been subjected to legal challenge and been deemed legal.
Opponents of vote swapping claim that it is illegal to give or accept anything that has pecuniary value in exchange for a vote. Proponents for vote pairing respond that vote pairing does not involve any pecuniary or monetary exchange. Instead, vote swapping is simply an informal, nonbinding agreement between people to vote strategically. In addition, vote pairing is a routine practice in legislative bodies, such as Congress and city councils.
The debate regarding the legality of vote pairing peaked during the 2000 presidential election, when there was a strong effort to shut down the U.S. vote-pairing websites. On October 30, 2000, eight days before the November 2000 United States presidential elections, California Secretary of State Bill Jones threatened to prosecute voteswap2000.com, a California-based vote pairing website. In response, voteswap2000.com and votexchange2000.com immediately shut their virtual doors. The site operators, Alan Porter (votexchange2000.com) and William Cody (voteswap2000.com), and two potential users of the sites, Patrick Kerr and Steven Lewis, took the state of California to court. The district court was slow to respond and abstained from making any decision. In 2003, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned this abstention.
On August 6, 2007, the 9th Circuit ruled that California's threats violated the First Amendment, writing:
The 9th Circuit did not decide whether the threats violated the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause.
As of 2024, vote swapping remains legal, so long as no money or gifts are exchanged.
Vote swapping websites can also help voters switch votes from district to district, such as VotePair.ca (also PairVote.ca), created by Gerry Kirk. In the 2008 Canadian federal election, VotePair.ca claimed that 6,000 people registered to swap their vote and 2,800 successful vote swaps occurred. In the 2011 Canadian federal election, VotePair.ca claimed that 5,741 people had registered 1 week before the election, that 7,522 people registered in total, and that 1,713 swaps (for 3,426 votes) officially occurred, of which 838 were swapped into Greens, 1367 into NDP, and 1488 into Liberals.
]] Since 2000, voters have used vote swapping as a tactical voting strategy in U.S. presidential elections. In this practice, a third-party voter from a swing state reaches an agreement with a Democratic or Republican voter from a red state or blue state (or "safe state"). Under this agreement, the third-party voter pledges to support the other's major party candidate, and in exchange, the Dem/Rep voter pledges to support the other's minor party candidate. For example, a Green voter in Wisconsin might swap with a Democratic voter in California.
Under the United States Electoral College, all of a state's votes go to the winning presidential candidate for that state, no matter how close the margin, in a winner-take-all system. Third-party candidates for president frequently garner no Electoral College votes, but can siphon off total votes from the front runners in order to call attention to their causes. Vote-swapping agreements allow third-party candidates to get of the popular vote, while the major-party candidate gets more of the Electoral College vote.
There are multiple reasons it would be important for Ralph Nader to still get his share of the national popular vote. One is that if he got five percent or more, then he could get federally distributed public funding in the next election. Also, and perhaps more importantly, he could possibly get included in the presidential debates for the next election in 2004. Third parties have protested their exclusion from the presidential debates.
In 2000, many of the vote pairing web sites were hosted in California, and so when the California Secretary of State, Bill Jones, charged that the web sites were illegal and threatened their creators with criminal prosecution, some (but not all) of the sites reluctantly shut down. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) got involved to protect the web sites, seeking a restraining order against Jones and then a permanent injunction against him, alleging that he had violated the constitutional rights of the web site creators. However, the issue would only be resolved after the 2000 election had already occurred.
It is possible that Jones's threats, which shut down several vote-swapping websites, changed the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. After the election, votetrader.org tallied up the total number of voter swaps across all vote-swapping websites at 16,024, of which 1,412 were Nader-to-Gore voters in Florida. Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified George W. Bush as winning Florida by just 537 votes, and certified Ralph Nader as winning 97,421 votes. Under this standard, if another 550 voters had swapped (about 0.5% of Nader's total), then Gore would have won. In their ruling on December 8, 2004, the Florida Supreme Court changed this margin to just 193 votes. Under this standard, if another 200 voters had swapped (about 0.2% of Nader's total), then Gore would have won. Put another way: If about 1,600 Nader supporters had vote paired instead of 1,400, Gore would have carried the election.
There were numerous other controversies in Florida's vote count: from the Palm Beach County butterfly ballots; to the question of whether Bush would have still won the state in a full recount; to how Katherine Harris, a Republican, was the co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida at the same time she was the Florida state secretary of state. Notably, the California state secretary of state, Bill Jones, who charged that the vote-pairing web sites were illegal, was also a Republican supporter of George W. Bush. The federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would eventually rule against him, but this decision did not come down until February 6, 2003, long after the 2000 election was already over. In the next presidential election, in 2004, the legality of the vote-pairing web sites went unquestioned. Indeed, the California state secretary of state for the 2004 election (a successor to Bill Jones) publicly announced, before that election, that vote pairing was legal.
Two campaigns hoped to swap votes between one Democratic voter and one Republican voter, who would both agree to vote for a third party candidate such as Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson or Green candidate Jill Stein:
SwapYourVote.org also argued in favor of ranked-choice voting, which would remove the need to swap votes.
In 2016, Stein campaign co-chair Gloria Mattera criticized vote pairing schemes, stating that the campaign's position on vote pairing is that it is a failed strategy because voting for the "lesser evil" had led highly distrusted major party candidates, and that Americans should instead vote for the candidate who best represents their interests.
Other criticisms of vote pairing consist of arguments against supporting third-parties in the first place. One criticism is that helping third parties could hurt the Democratic Party in future elections, because if a third party secures 5% of the total votes, they are entitled to federal funds, and can then siphon off more votes from the Democratic Party in future elections.
For example, in the 2009 Burlington mayoral election, voters who supported moderate Republican Kurt Wright eliminated Democrat Andy Montroll in the second round, allowing socialist candidate Bob Kiss to win. If a similar instant-runoff system were adopted nationwide, Republicans in Vermont would have a strong incentive to swap votes with Democrats in districts where the Democrat was unlikely to win. A similar situation occurred in the 2022 Alaska special election.
Most rated voting systems (including approval voting and score voting) satisfy the favorite betrayal criterion, rendering vote-pairing fully unnecessary. Proportional representation systems also make the practice less important (although it can still occur if there are regionally-calculated electoral thresholds).
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