Elections

Websites are telling voters to swap votes to stop Trump. Is that legal?

By Kate Irby

kirby@mcclatchy.com

October 27, 2016 09:59 AM

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a meeting with first responders at St. Johns County Sheriffs Department on Monday in St. Augustine, Fla. Evan Vucci AP

It’s a feeling many are familiar with this election season: You would rather vote for a third-party candidate because you dislike both major party candidates, but you are afraid of “wasting” your vote and allowing the candidate you dislike more into the nation’s highest office.

If the candidate you dislike more is Donald Trump, these websites might have a solution for you.

Two websites, both under the name Trump Traders, ask people from swing states who want to vote for a third-party candidate to instead vote for Hillary Clinton. That person is then promised that someone in a less pivotal state that was going to vote for Clinton would instead vote for their preferred third-party candidate.

“If you are #NeverTrump but want to support Gary Johnson or another third party candidate in a swing state, don’t do it. You may toss the election to Trump,” one website states. “Instead, find a friend in a state that’s safely blue or red – they’ll vote for your third party candidate in exchange for your vote for Clinton.”

One website offers a smartphone application to connect people in swing states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and even Texas, which according to the polls could possibly go to Clinton in this election. The other website asks people to sign up through Facebook and connects them directly based on who they want to vote for and where they live.

“Ship your vote into a state where it can’t help Trump win,” the website says.

With Trump’s assertions that the election could be “rigged,” it begs the question: Is vote swapping legal?

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This isn’t the first time people have called on others to trade votes to help a certain candidate. In 2000, several vote-swapping websites asked people in swing states who wanted to vote for Ralph Nader to switch votes to benefit Al Gore. One was dubbed Nader Trader, and had 90,000 hits just days before the 2000 election, according to Slate.

It does not violate federal law, because that law is narrow and specifies that a voter must receive something of monetary value for it to be illegal. Since a vote doesn’t have monetary value, federal law doesn’t apply. But the California secretary of state said vote-swapping for Nader and Gore was against state election law and a few of the sites that were started in California shut down.

The National Voting Rights Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California then filed a lawsuit on behalf of one of the websites, votexchange2000, saying vote-swapping was protected under the First Amendment.

A federal appeals court in California agreed with them in 2007, ruling that vote-swapping is protected under the Constitution.

“The Web sites did not encourage the trading of votes for money, or indeed for anything other than other votes,” the circuit court said in its decision.

The ACLU said in a prophetic statement at the time that this would be significant in future elections.

“The decision will be an important precedent protecting the right of Web site operators and voters to maintain and use such sites in future presidential elections.”