Some progressives are encouraging vote swapping, to allow voters to make a statement without throwing the election to former President Donald Trump. Courtesy of Getty Images
By Mira Fox
November 5, 2024
Many left-leaning Americans, and Arab Americans in particular, are not convinced by Vice President Kamala Harris. Their reasons vary, with many citing concerns that Harris has not spoken out strongly enough about the suffering in Gaza, and others worried about her stance on fracking or climate change.
But most of these voters are also worried that not voting for Harris will help put former President Donald Trump in office, something they see as a worse outcome. Swap Your Vote offers a simple solution for those in swing states: find someone in a solidly Democratic state willing to cast a protest vote on your behalf. And the group says more than 11,000 people have done it so far.
Some people have arranged to swap votes with friends and family members, but Swap Your Vote will also connect strangers from swing states and “blue” ones, even promising two “protest votes” in a Democratic state for every one vote for Harris in one of the seven swing states expected to decide the election. The organization’s website says it is helping people to “protest the system AND defeat Trump.”
Voters can fill out a form to be connected with a vote-swapping partner up until an hour before the polls close on Election Day. The organization encourages the voters to talk to each other in order to build trust that the strangers will cast their votes as promised, and to decide how to best deploy the protest votes. (It also urges people to first try to vote swap within their personal networks.)
“We are offering a simple, legal, proven, private way to outsmart the system. I voted for Nader in 2000, and that didn’t go well for anything I care about,” Kipchoge Spencer, founder of Landslide PAC, which is hosting the Swap Your Vote effort, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “We want to give people an opportunity to vote their conscience without being a spoiler and electing Trump.”
The uncommitted movement, which galvanized some 700,000 votes across the country in this spring’s Democratic primaries protesting the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, has avoided endorsing Harris, but told supporters not to do anything to help Trump win. Its co-founder, Abbas Alawiah, has urged voters to take part in the vote swapping movement.
On the Swap Your Vote Instagram page, pairs discuss what the protest vote should be; one blue state voter promised her swing-state compatriot that she would write in “free Palestine” on her ballot, while a Pennsylvania voter promised to vote for Harris if her blue-state connection would pick Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
“Swap Your Vote gave me a way to stand by my principles while ensuring that Trump doesn’t get back in office,” said the Rev. Linda Noonan. “It felt really good to take action in a way that truly represents my values, knowing that I could still make a difference in Pennsylvania.”
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