Vote pairing
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Vote pairing (or vote swapping as it has also been called) is the method where a voter in one district agrees to vote tactically for a less-preferred candidate or party who has a greater chance of winning in their district, in exchange for a voter from another district voting tactically for the candidate the first voter prefers, because that candidate has a greater possibility of winning in that district.
This occurs informally (i.e., without binding contracts) but sometimes with great sophistication in the United States, United Kingdom and other places.
Using UK elections as an example, tactical voting is often between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. There may be one constituency in which the Labour Party and the Conservative Party candidates are running in a tight race, with the Liberal Democrat far behind. In another constituency, the Liberal Democrat and Conservative candidates may be in a tight race, with the Labour candidate far behind. A Liberal Democrat voter in the first constituency would agree to vote for the Labour candidate in exchange for a Labour voter from the second constituency voting for the Liberal Democrat candidate.
Tactical voting has been used since 2000 as a strategy for the U.S. presidential election, with voters from "safe" states voting for third-party candidates, and voters from states with contested races voting for the second-preference candidate of the voters from the third-party.
[edit] Change in terminology from "vote swapping" in 2000 to "vote pairing" by 2004
Through the 2000 election, the concept was known in the US as "vote swapping," while "vote pairing" originally had a somewhat different meaning--where people of opposing parties would agree to together vote for a third-party candidate instead of for their own candidates. (For example, a disaffected Democrat and a disaffected Republican both agreeing to vote for a third party candidate instead of for the candidates of their own parties.) However, by the 2004 Presidential election "vote swapping" had become "vote pairing," and the various people who had created vote swapping sites for the 2000 election had banded together as VotePair.org (see link at bottom).
[edit] Vulnerable to manipulation or electoral sabotage?
The concern often gets raised on whether vote pairing can be used by opposing parties to manipulate an election or sabotage a candidate. However, in practice, such ideas of manipulation turn out to be impractical.
For an example, suppose that in the 2004 election the former Republican Pat Buchanan had again run for President under the Reform Party (as he did in the 2000 election). Suppose that supporters of the 2004 Republican candidate, George W. Bush, had set up vote pairing web sites so that Buchanan supporters from swing states in the US (such as Ohio, where the Democrats and Republicans were in a close race) would get matched with Bush supporters in solidly Democrat states (such as Massachusetts). This was not actually done of course (since Buchanan did not run in 2004), but suppose that Republican supporters of George W. Bush had gotten concerned that Democratic supporters of John Kerry would try to sabotage these web sites or manipulate the election by posing as either Bush or Buchanan supporters. However, if such Democrats had done so, all they could do is pose as George W. Bush supporters in solidly Democratic states or as Buchanan supporters in swing states. In the former situation (Democrats posing as Bush supporters in solidly Democrat states such as Massachusetts), all they could do is trick Buchanan supporters in swing states to cast their vote for Bush--which would only hurt the Democratic candidate, John Kerry. Similarly, in the latter situation (Democrats posing as Buchanan supporters in swing states), all they could do is trick Bush supporters in solidly Democrat states to vote for Buchanan--which wouldn't change the election since the Democrat candidate, John Kerry, would very likely carry those states anyway.
We can work through this same issue in the opposite political direction--where it actually was a concern of Democrats in the 2004 election. In the 2004 Presidential election, votepair.org matched Democratic Party supporters of John Kerry in staunchly Republican states with third-party supporters in swing states (including Ralph Nader supporters, Libertarian Party supporters of Michael Badnarik, or Green Party supporters of David Cobb). A common question was whether Republican supporters of George W. Bush could manipulate the election by posing as John Kerry supporters or as third-party supporters. However, if such people had posed as third-party supporters in swing states, all they could do is trick John Kerry supporters in staunchly Republican states to vote for a third-party candidate--which wouldn't change the outcome of the election (since George W. Bush would win those states anyway). Similarly if such people had posed as John Kerry supporters in staunchly Republican states, all they could do is trick third-party supporters in swing states to vote for John Kerry--which would have politically hurt George W. Bush, not helped him.
Ultimately the only real way to manipulate vote pairing, and its effect on an election outcome, is to prevent people from learning about it; not by posing as a different kind of voter. Arguably, this kind of manipulation is what happened in the in the 2000 Presidential election, as discussed below.
[edit] Legality of vote pairing questioned
In the United States (and perhaps elsewhere), the legality of vote pairing in public elections has been questioned. Opponents claim that it is illegal to give or accept anything that has pecuniary value in exchange for a vote. (Indeed efforts to buy or sell votes are illegal, and in the 2000 Presidential election, there was even a web site for buying and selling votes, vote-auction.com, which was shut down by an Illinois judge. See link at bottom.) Proponents for vote pairing respond that vote pairing doesn't involve any pecuniary or monetary exchange; rather, simply informal, nonbinding agreements between people to vote strategically. Also, vote pairing is a routine practice in legislative bodies, city councils, etc. See the next section on the issue of legality in the United States presidential election, 2000.
[edit] The issue of the legality of vote pairing and the United States presidential election, 2000
It can be argued that the charge that vote pairing was illegal in the US (or vote swapping as it has also been called) was itself politically manipulative, rather than an authentic legal question. The debate peaked during the 2000 presidential election, when there was a strong effort to shut down the US vote-pairing web sites. However, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals eventually ruled against this action (see bottom for a link to the decision), and by the 2004 Presidential election there was no such effort to shut down vote pairing.
The debate intensified in the final days of the 2000 election when six Republican state secretaries of state, led by the California secretary of state, Bill Jones, charged that vote-pairing web sites were illegal and threatened criminal charges against their creators. Multiple web sites had sprung up that were matching supporters of the Democratic Presidential candidate, Al Gore, with supporters of the strongest third party candidate, Ralph Nader. Some argued that Ralph Nader was drawing support from left leaning Democrats that would otherwise vote for Al Gore. However, the strategy was that this issue only mattered in swing states, that is states where it wasn't clear whether the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, or the Rebublican candidate, George W. Bush, would win. By the United States Electoral College, the winner of a swing state gets all of that state's electoral college votes--no matter how close the margin of victory was for that state.
The strategy of the vote pairing web sites in the 2000 election was to match supporters of Ralph Nader in swing states like Florida with supporters of Al Gore in staunchly Republican states like Texas. That is, in swing states like Florida, Ralph Nader supporters would vote for Al Gore and the Al Gore supporters in Republican states like Texas would vote for Ralph Nader. This way Al Gore might carry Florida and other swing states, while Ralph Nader would still get the same total share of the national popular vote. In the United States Electoral College it wouldn't matter whether voters in Republican states like Texas voted for Al Gore or Ralph Nader, because George W. Bush was still expected to be the sure winner in such states.
There are multiple reasons it would be important for Ralph Nader to still get his share of the national vote. One is that if he got 5 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 (for more information see "Third-party protests and legal actions" section under United States presidential election debates, 2004).
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 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 consititional rights of the web site creators (see the ACLU news release at bottom). However, the issue would only be resolved after the 2000 election had already occurred. Not all of the vote pairing web sites shut down in the 2000 election, but the rumor started to spread that the web sites were illegal, and arguably this discouraged more people from going to the remaining web sites.
It is possible that Jones's threats of criminal charges against the creators of the vote-pair web sites changed the outcome of the 2000 Presidential election. One of the web sites, votetrader.org, tallied the number of people that had registered to pair their votes on all the vote-pairing web sites. They tallied that 1,412 Nader supporters in Florida had gotten matched with Gore supporters from Republican states. George W. Bush was certified as winning Florida by only 537 votes--by Florida's controversial Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. The Florida Supreme Court then changed this margin to just 193 votes at most, in their ruling on December 8, 2004. Approximately 2,900,000 people voted for George W. Bush and Al Gore each in Florida, while the number that voted for Ralph Nader was certified at 97,421 votes (see the Wikipedia article, "United States presidential election, 2000"). If only another 0.19% of the voters for Ralph Nader in Florida had vote paired (i.e. 1.62% of Floridian Nader supporters, instead of 1.43%), Al 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 cochair of the Bush campaign in Florida at the same time she was the Florida Secretary of State (see the Wikipedia article, "United States presidential election, 2000 Florida results"). Notably, the California Secretary of State, Bill Jones, who charged that the votepairing 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 (see bottom for a link to the decision--although note that the decision has been appealed to the Ninth Circuit). In the next Presidential election, in 2004, the legality of the votepairing web sites went unquestioned. Indeed, the California Secretary of State for the 2004 election (a successor to Bill Jones) publicly announced that vote pairing was not illegal before the election.
A central question is whether Bill Jones knew that the outcome of the federal Ninth Circuit decision would vindicate the vote pairing web sites. It can be argued that he should have known this, because strategic vote pairing was already common on city councils, in the US Congress, in other legislative bodies, etc., and does not involve actually buying or selling votes. If he did know, then arguably he challenged the legality of the vote pairing web sites and threatened criminal prosection in order to manipulate the election unfairly.
For more history on the vote pairing web sites and their legality in the 2000 Presidential election, as well as an online debate around their legality, see the article in Slate Magazine referenced at bottom or the full legal analysis in the Washington University Law Quarterly.
[edit] Alternatives to vote pairing in single-winner elections: instant-runoff voting, or ranked-choice voting, and approval voting
Vote pairing is a voter strategy for single-winner elections, but it is made moot by the election system of instant-runoff voting, or ranked choice voting. Vote pairing allows a person to electorally support a candidate that is unlikely to win an election, without inadvertently preventing the election of another candidate that they would otherwise prefer. Instant-runoff voting addresses this same problem within an official voting system. In instant-runoff voting, voters rank their choices. A computer runs through everyone's first choices and then the candidate that comes in last gets taken out. The votes of everyone who voted for that candidate then get redistributed to their second-choice candidates and the computer runs through everyone's new top choices again. The process repeats until there's only one candidate left. Advocates of vote pairing tend to simultaneously advocate instant-runoff voting in election reform.
Another alternative is approval voting, which doesn't use a rank ballot. In approval voting, voters vote for as many candidates as they approve of. The total number of approval votes can greatly exceed the number of voters, but the candidate with the most approval votes wins.
[edit] See also
- This entry is related to, but not included in the elections and voting series. Other related articles can be found at the Politics Portal.
- Tactical voting
- Instant-runoff voting
- Condorcet method
[edit] External links and Sources
For an FAQ on votepair.org that addresses the issue of whether votepairing could get used to manipulate an election or sabotage a candidate:
For an FAQ on votepair.org that addresses instant-runoff voting and voting reform, which would make vote pairing moot:
For an article referencing how a web site for actually buying and selling votes, vote-auction.com, was shut down by an Illinois judge in the 2000 Presidential election:
For the February 6, 2003 federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision against Bill Jones, the California Secretary of State in the 2000 election, who threatened criminal charges against the creators of vote pairing web sites:
For the total vote-pairing tally in Florida by the vote-pairing web sites in the 2000 Presidential election:
For details on how the vote count in Florida varied from what Katherine Harris certified and what the Florida Supreme Court Ruled, see the following CNN web page:
For the ACLU's news release on how they challenged charging the vote-pairing web sites as illegal, "ACLU Seeks Permanent Court Order on Issue of Online Voter Matching" (11/27/2000):
For more history on the vote-pairing web sites and their legality in the 2000 Presidential election, as well as an online debate around their legality, see the article posted on November 1, 2000 in the online magazine, Slate, "Is Vote-Swapping Legal?" by Jeremy Derfner:
For more discussion of the 2004 votepair effort, See Scott Duke Harris, Swap The Vote, ORLANDO WEEKLY, Oct. 21, 2004:
For votepair.org's response to the question of the legality of vote pairing:
For legal analysis of the issue of vote pairing, Marc J. Randazza, The Other Election Controversy of Y2K: Core First Amendment Values and High-Tech Political Coalitions, 82 Washington University Law Quarterly 143, 240-241 (2004). http://law.wustl.edu/WULQ/82-1/p143%20Randazza%20book%20pages.pdf
