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How to swap your General Election vote with a stranger

At the 2015 general election, I headed down to my local polling station and voted on behalf of someone I had never met. That someone was Bharat Malkani, constituent of Bristol North West.

We were introduced via a kind of dating site for dissatisfied voters called SwapMyVote.com, which has just relaunched for the 2017 General Election. The site asks you two simple questions: the party you would ideally vote for, and the party you would be willing to vote for.

Based on this information, it searches for “matches” among other people who have signed up.

For example, in 2015, I lived in Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency of Islington North, one of the 20 safest Labour seats in the country. If I voted Labour, my vote wouldn’t count for much.

“We’re not just waiting around for a electoral reform to happen. Instead, we’re creating it ourselves.”

Tom de Grunwald, SwapMyVote founder 

Bharat lived in Bristol North West, a close marginal between Labour and the Tories. He wasn’t happy with Labour – their campaigning around issues like immigration had made him feel “a bit sick” – but also didn’t want them to lose.

So at my polling station, I voted Green, and at his, he voted Labour. Both our votes counted.

SwapMyVote’s founder, Tom de Grunwald, reckons that “tens of thousands” of people signed up to swap their vote on SwapMyVote and VoteSwap, a similar site, in 2015. He predicts that it will be even more popular in this election.

‘Souped-up tactical voting’

De Grunwald tells me that he sees vote swapping as a kind of “souped-up tactical voting”. Tactical voting is already a popular concept in 2017 – Tactical2017, a spreadsheet and later website telling voters how to vote to stop the Conservatives winning in their area, went viral days after the election was announced.

But pure tactical voting means you don’t get to support the party – perhaps a smaller party – which you actually wanted to vote for. “Vote Swapping helps counter that resentment,” de Grunwald says. “Someone else is casting that vote for you. So many people are talking about a progressive alliance. This is just another way to do that.”

‘Whoever I vote for, the whole state of affairs makes me want to give up on democracy’

Bharat Malkani, potential vote swapper 

De Grunwald, who works in the media, first had the idea in 2010, weeks before the General Election. “I had just moved out of a constituency where there was a potential breakthrough about to happen that I really wanted to vote for. So I was talking to one of my friends who still lived there and we suggested doing a vote swap ourselves. And I had a tiny light bulb moment of: ‘Oh, what if you had a website that did this?'” He wrote a blog post suggesting it, and asking if anyone could help him build it.

No one came forward until 2014, when his eventual co-founder, James Allen, thought of the idea too, Googled it, and found his blog post.

Not just for progressives

Tactical voting is often presented as a left-wing tactic, but in the 2015 election Conservative campaigner Toby Young set up Unite The Right to coordinate Ukip and pro-Brexit Tory voters. Vote swapping would also make sense if you wanted to vote for Ukip but didn’t want Labour to win in your Labour/Tory marginal seat, for example.

SwapMyVote was politically neutral (while VoteSwap was explicitly positioned against the Tories) though the Green/Labour swap, like mine and Bharat’s, tended to dominate.

“We can’t fulfill every swap which is frustrating,” de Grunwald tells me, “but in a way it’s just another level of how frustrating the electoral system is.”

Voteswapping 2017

Thanks to the quick turnaround between election announcement and election this year, fewer of these sites seem to be popping up.

VoteSwap, which offered a similar service to SwapMyVote last time, is now CampaignTogether.org, which tells you where you can best campaign in your area to keep the Conservatives from winning. If you enter your postcode, it will tell you whether your seat is a marginal, whether candidates are Remain or Leave, and whether your campaigning energies are best spent in your own constituency or another nearby.

Bharat Malkani on whether he’ll vote swap again:

“I’m in a right quandary this time round. I’m still a Lib Dem supporter, despite their sins, and the fact they’ve taken a clear pro-EU stance should consolidate my vote for them. But I’m also very anti-Tory, and if Labour pose the most credible threat to them in my constituency, then I’ll be voting for them and asking someone else to vote Lib Dem on my behalf.

“Whether I swap my vote or not depends on whether my hatred for the Tories outweighs my support for the Lib Dems. But ultimately whoever I vote for, the whole state of affairs makes me want to give up on democracy.”

SwapMyVote is also hoping to introduce information about Brexit – the biggest electoral change since the last election – on its site, though it has launched without it for now.

“It’s a big issue for lots of voters, so we want to have some information there,” de Grunwald says.

There are no laws against vote swapping, which has been going on in one form or another for centuries, though it certainly doesn’t use the current system as designed.

Then again, for many people, that’s exactly the point.

As de Grunwald puts it: “We’re not just waiting around for electoral reform to happen. Instead, we’re creating it ourselves.”

How to swap your vote

Visit SwapMyVote.com

Enter your preferred party and a second party you’d be willing to vote for.

Enter your email address, and the site will let you know when there’s a potential match for you.

Other resources

CampaignTogether.org tells you whether your seat is a marginal, and how the seat voted in the EU referendum

DemocracyClub gives you information on different candidates

TheyWorkForYou tells you how politicians voted on different issues in the Commons

This article forms part of a series on tactical voting. View other pieces here

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