Hey, it’s not too late yet. I may not be able to take part in this election anymore but if you haven’t voted yet, you still can.
I imagine that there are tons of third party voters out there, who haven’t voted early yet because they’re feeling conflicted between voting their conscience and preventing armageddon. I’m sure you’ll be able to find folks to pair up with and exchange if you go for it!
Ah, I think get it now.
So swing state voter who really wants to vote for say Stein due to her policy on Gaza but wants Harris to win in case Stein loses, can swap with a safe state voter who’s first preference is voting for Harris.
Then the safe state voter votes Stein (perhaps as a write-in vote if Stein’s not on the ballot there), and the swing state voter votes Harris.
The safe state voter feels good because they caused one vote for Harris that Harris might not have gotten otherwise, especially in a swing state. The swing state voter feels good because they caused one vote for Stein but also didn’t risk swinging the election to the GOP by costing Harris a valuable swing state.
This is brilliant! I wish I had heard about this earlier, as I already voted, but I’d love to do something like this next time around.
Imagine, if every voter in Michigan and Wisconsin who was voting for Stein swapped with a Dem voter in California. Maybe a lot of these folks wouldn’t care between the two (GOP vs Dem) but probably there’s a significant amount here who would still rank Harris above the GOP choice. So this prevents a protest vote from helping the candidate that they’d like the least.
I’m intrigued.
I don’t quite get what the swing state voter gets out of it though - or why they’d give up their stronger voting power (see https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/19/15831640/supreme-court-gerrymandering-wisconsin for an explanation) for the lesser power of the person in the safe state.
What surprises me is that these seem to be all on other instances - including a few big ones like just.works - rather than someone spinning up their own instance to create unlimited accounts to downvote/spam/etc.
I think piefed.social/pyfedi (which is slowly implementing support for all such objects) should get a mention here as well