Vote Pairing - Legality

Legality

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.) 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.

According to Declan McCullagh, California Secretary of State Bill Jones even threatened to prosecute voteswap2000.com and votexchange2000.com (which immediately shut their virtual doors in response). The site operators--Alan Porter, Patrick Kerr, Steven Lewis, and William Cody--took the state of California to court.

On 8-6-2007, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that "the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected" and California's spurious threats violated the First Amendment. The 9th Circuit did not decide whether the threats violated the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause.

Here's the key graf: "Both the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms and the communication and vote swaps that they enabled were...constitutionally protected. At their core, they amounted to efforts by politically engaged people to support their preferred candidates and to avoid election results that they feared would contravene the preferences of a majority of voters in closely contested states. Whether or not one agrees with these voters' tactics, such efforts, when conducted honestly and without money changing hands, are at the heart of the liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment."