Court rules that online vote-swapping is legal
Oh the hands of justice, they move swiftly. Seven years after the 2000 election, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California issued a ruling regarding websites trying to affect the outcome of that contest.If you put on your memory cap, you may recall that vote-swapping was all the rage back in 2000. The idea was that if you lived in a solidly "red" or "blue" state, you could be pretty sure how your state would sway during the Bush/Gore election. Thanks to the United States' electoral college system, Bush supporters in New England and Gore supporters in Texas were pretty sure they were throwing their votes away.
So you visit a web page like voteexchange2000.com or voteswap2000.com and find someone in another state who is willing to trade their vote with yours. You'll go ahead and help their candidate win by a wide margin in your state if they'll cast a ballot for your preferred candidate. While it was never likely that a Bush supporter would vote for Gore, the proponents of these websites were trying to increase the turnout for alternative party candidates like Ralph Nader.
Well, the state of California wasn't too happy about the whole thing. And according to this week's court ruling, the secretary of state sent a letter to the the owner of voteswap2000 demanding the site be shut down since "the right to free and fair elections is a cornerstone of American democracy. Any person or entity that tries to exchange votes or brokers the exchange of votes will be pursued with the utmost vigor."
The sites were shut down, but civil liberties groups complained that this was a free speech issue, and seven years later, the courts have agreed. Unless this works its way up to the US Supreme Court, the ruling could open the floodgates for vote-swapping sites to proliferate during the 2008 election season.
