A defense of vote swapping
It's fine and normal, and third parties are bad for democracy
In the last few days I’ve had debates with a few people about the ethics of vote swapping. Vote swapping is where a Democrat or Republican voter in a safe state makes an agreement with a third party voter in a swing state to vote for the third party candidate in the safe state if the person in the swing state votes for the Democrat or Republican. For example, in 2024 I wanted Harris to win, so I made an agreement with a Jill Stein voter in Pennsylvania: If she voted for Harris in Pennsylvania, I’d vote for Stein in DC. In both situations, Stein receives the same amount of votes, and because third party votes are just protest votes, the same message is sent to the powers that be. But in the swap, Harris gets a key vote in a swing state, and my vote becomes drastically more impactful than if I had voted Harris in DC. The other voter also strongly preferred Harris to Trump but wanted to give Stein a vote to send a message to the Democrats against their military support for Israel. Thus the swap was a big win for both of us. You can read more about vote swapping here.
This seems shifty. and it’s good that people have strong internal norms against doing shifty stuff when it comes to voting. Liberal democracy is fragile and held together by social norms about election behavior, so it’s good that people have an intuitive negative response to stuff like this. That’s understandable, but if we think about it more I claim that vote swapping actually becomes perfectly defensible. I can see six potential objections to vote swapping:
I argue that each of these objections falls apart with some pretty simple intuition pumps. I’ll give an argument or intuition pump to refute each.
Why am I writing this? I’d like both sides to use vote swapping more and it’s fresh on my mind, and I’m trying to distract myself from Trump winning again. I also think posts like this can be useful for clarifying how you think about the ethics and expectations around political philosophy questions, so I’ve tried to go into detail there.
1. Vote swapping is more inherently shifty than our normal practices around voting, so we shouldn’t do it
This first example is a general attempt to deflate the bad vibes around vote swapping:
Intuition pump: I have a friend in a swing state who isn’t going to vote, even though he’s registered and his polling place is across the street. I realize the day before the election that I’m still registered to vote in a safe state that’s far away (let’s say I’m registered in Massachusetts and live in DC). I call my friend and say “Hey, I’d really like you to vote. Let’s make an agreement. I’m planning to put a ton of effort into actually voting. I’m going to drive 8 hours from DC to Massachusetts to get to my polling place. If I actually manage to do that, can you commit to voting too? If I’m putting in so much effort, I’d like you to at least cross the street!” My friend agrees with me and makes the deal. I drive to Massachusetts and vote, and that convinces him to vote for Harris in the swing state where he wouldn’t have otherwise voted.
How bad was it to make this deal? I don’t see this as bad at all. Friends do a lot to motivate each other to vote, including social pressure and committing to vote together. Democracy can remain very healthy with people applying social pressure to each other to vote. Social pressure and signaling is maybe the main reason most people vote at all! The only difference between the drive to Massachusetts and the vote swap is that in the drive to Massachusetts situation Harris is benefited more: she gets 2 votes instead of 1. Admittedly one of the votes is in a safe state, so we could count that as essentially fake, but the third party vote is at least equally fake. The odds of Harris losing Massachusetts are astronomically low, but the odds of Stein winning Massachusetts are even lower. In the drive to Massachusetts example I’m voting strategically to encourage a swing state voter to vote Harris, and it’s clear that this isn’t problematic at all, and I claim that vote swapping is less shifty than this because the only difference is that vote swapping helps Harris less. It’s essentially the same action but with less of a payoff for the candidate I want.
2. Vote swapping is in some way dishonest
I’m against dishonesty in voting. It is extremely bad to give someone incorrect information about when and where to vote. This is a clear deontic norm that shouldn’t be violated under basically any normal circumstance. The main reason we have a government at all is to mediate drastically different concepts of what’s good and allow members of society with very different beliefs to live together well without feeling like they need to resort to violence to defend their dignity and rights. Democracy is a core part of legitimizing the government as a mediator, because if a portion of the population didn’t have democratic representation they would be at the mercy of their ideological enemies wielding the machinery of the state. The state would become an enemy rather than a mediator, and because the state’s mediation requires buy-in from both sides of an issue, the state’s ability to mediate differences at all would collapse, leading to violence and a lack of freedom. If one side is attempting to use deceit to take away a group’s access to the vote, they are essentially trying to rob them of their rightful access to the machinery of the state and are endangering the cornerstone of liberal society. This might sound extreme, but imagine how you would feel if the Trump campaign sent out mass advertisements to liberal voters giving them an incorrect date and time for the election. This would be correctly seen as an existential risk to the normal democratic process and therefore should be shunned in every case, down to individuals tricking each other.
I don’t see a clear victim of dishonesty in vote swapping. No one is being given incorrect information that is causing them to vote in a different way or not vote at all. The only place this could be seen as dishonest is that I myself am being dishonest in who I actually want to be President (I’m voting for Stein but actually want Harris). However, I claim in example 3 below that we are all constantly doing this when we vote anyway, so there’s nothing uniquely dishonest about the vote swap. Because there is no one receiving incorrect information preventing them from voting in the way they want, I claim that there is no dishonesty involved in vote swapping.
3. Voting ought to be a representation of your own political desire, not a complicated utilitarian trade to try to change the election outcome.
Intuition pump: I believe in my heart that the best possible person to be elected President is my personal friend Chris. Chris is not and will never run for President, but I know he’s a much better option than either Harris or Trump. Among other things he’s vegan! The nation needs an example of a strong vegan leader. I go to the ballot box and am about to write his name in, because he represents my actual political desires and goals. Right before I get to the polling place, someone approaches me with an argument: “It’s cool that you value voting so much and want to vote for the person you actually think would do the best job, but I really prefer Harris to win against Trump and want to convince you that instead of voting for Chris, you should be utilitarian and do the thing that has the actual highest expected value, which is voting for Harris. There’s no way Chris will win, but your Harris vote would add to the pile contributing to her potential victory.”
Would it be evil or wrong to ignore what’s in my heart and vote for Harris instead? I don’t think so. Democracy is healthy despite absolutely no Democrat or Republican voter believing that the single person on Earth who would be the absolute best President is the person they’re voting for. Every Republican and Democrat voter is in fact already making the complicated utilitarian trade to change the election outcome. I see a vote swap as being identical to this utilitarian trade. If I vote for Stein in DC because of a vote swap, that represents the highest expected value for my beliefs. Neither a vote for Stein or Harris represents what’s actually in my heart, which is President Chris, but in the right context each is the most useful button for me to push. The main difference between these two situations is that in the Stein case the utilitarian trade involves influencing another voter’s behavior, but I’ve already discussed why this isn’t an issue in objection 1. Separately, by making Harris the most likely liberal candidate to win (against all the third party candidates) each Harris voter is adding to the reasonableness of voting for Harris, because their additional vote is adding to the likelihood that my own Harris vote will carry her into the majority, so in a sense my commitment to vote for Harris is also an attempt to influence other people using my vote.
4. Vote swapping violates federalism and infringes on each individual state’s right to act as its own political unit
I’m in a minority of American liberals who actually thinks federalism and even the Electoral College is very good. I’m wary of too much concentrated power in a big centralized government and would prefer each state to be able to experiment a lot with its style of governance (not too much though… If states secede to support slavery we gotta invade them, brutally suppress the class of people there who were rebelling against us, and rebuild their societies from the ground up. I contain multitudes). I take concerns about federalism seriously. It seems like vote swapping is an attempt to hack the Electoral College and move votes around to effectively determine the election by popular vote instead. I think this is the strongest objection to vote swapping, but it’s still not very strong, because there are a lot of other more blatant violations of federalism in voting we’re totally fine with.
Intuition pump: It’s a month before the election, I live in a safe state, and I haven’t registered to vote yet. A friend offers me a crazy opportunity: she’s found a secret gold mine in the mountains of California. The only limit to how much money we can get out of it will be based on how fast we as individuals can mine the gold. I can expect to make about $10,000/day mining. Because I want Harris to win the 2024 election, I realize that I could donate that $10,000/day to her campaign to spend on ad money in a swing state to help her get elected. Because I’m in a safe state, I realize that my vote is basically meaningless, and taking the time to register to vote would cause me to lose out on a day of mining the gold. I decide that it’s not worth it to spend the time registering in my safe state, so I give up my ability to vote there and fly straight to California, start mining the gold, and send all the money to the swing state, influencing dozens of voters.
How objectionable is this? It doesn’t seem objectionable at all. Many very wealthy people donate much more than $10,000/day to their candidates of choice, who go on to spend that money in different states and influence the outcome of the election there. By choosing to not register to vote, I’ve sacrificed my one vote in a safe state to gain multiple votes in the swing state. This is basically a trade to move votes around between states and influence politics across state lines, and is much more of an extreme violation of the Electoral College system than the vote swap. The vote swap only involves a 1-1 vote trade, whereas going to the mine involves me trading my one vote for multiple swing state votes. To be consistent in opposition to vote swapping on federalist grounds would also mean a more or less total ban on spending money on the elections in any other state. I don’t think anyone would support that.
5. Vote swapping is stupid because you have no way of being sure the other person will follow through!
It’s true that there’s no way to verify that the other person you’re swapping with will actually vote in the way you want, but the expected value still pays out for very low odds. We can assume one additional Harris vote in DC is basically worthless (there’s no real chance of Harris losing DC) whereas a Harris vote in Pennsylvania is very valuable because it could meaningfully contribute to her victory. Let’s assign a value of 1 point to a DC Harris vote and a value of 100 points to a PA Harris vote (I actually think the difference in value is much greater). We can assign a value of 0 to any Stein vote because it neither helps nor hurts Harris if the alternative is not voting at all. Let’s assume that 19 out of 20 Stein voters who sign up to vote swap are liars and won’t actually follow through, but 1 in 20 Stein voters do vote Harris after they agree to swap. Therefore, the odds of the Stein vote actually voting Harris after the vote swap are 5%. Even here, the expected value looks pretty good:
No vote swap: 1 DC Harris vote (1 point) + 1 PA Stein vote (0 points) = 1 point
Vote swap: 1 DC Stein vote (0 points) + a 5% chance of a PA Harris vote and a 95% of a PA Stein vote ((100 points x 5%) + (0 points x 95%) = 5 points) = 5 points
So even if 95% of Stein voters are liars, this still makes a vote swap 5 times as impactful as not swapping. A great deal! This seems worth the risk.
6. You’d object if the other side did this!
Vote swapping is pretty fringe and only recently became more popular in the 2024 election, mainly among Democrats. I’d like to see both sides use it more, not just Democrats. Third party candidates are bad for authentically democratic representation in a first-pst-the-post voting system because they make it less likely that the ideology they’re associated with will govern. If more people vote for the green party, it becomes less likely that the ideology associated with the green party (progressive environmentalism) will actually gain power (most votes for the Green Party are in a sense a win for the Republicans). I think it’s important that democracies authentically represent what their voters want, so third parties by definition are bad for democratic representation in the system we have. We have two options here: change to a different voting system than first-past-the-post, or try to decrease the influence of third parties as much as possible. I’d like conservatives to have democratic representation based on how many people in the country are actually conservatives. That’s a healthier system than conservatives getting tricked into voting libertarian when they’d prefer a Republican candidate to the Democrat. If I found out that conservative politicians were talking with libertarian voters to convince them to vote Republican, my reaction would be “This is a normal part of politics! It’s also good that the libertarian party is being undermined because it basically functions as a weird protest vote system that incorrectly tallies what voters actually want out of their government.” If those talks included offers to vote swap, I don’t see how that would change my opinion. In 2024 Trump and his allies regularly promoted the Green Party and Cornel West as great alternatives to Harris. This was in my opinion more shifty than vote swapping, because it was a way of tricking people into giving their votes away to stupid meaningless third party organizations that basically exist to prevent progressive interests from receiving the correct amount of political representation, but it was still completely fair game! Trump, like any other citizen, has every right to saw “Jill Stein is a great candidate” without punishment. If candidates endorsing other candidates is acceptable behavior, vote swapping is as well, on either side.