A website that helps supporters of third-party candidates who live in swing states swap votes with residents of solidly Democratic or Republican ones is gaining traction as Election Day approaches. But organizers say they're still not getting enough volunteers from swing states to match up with voters in stable ones.
As of Tuesday, VotePair, a vote-swapping website conceived by supporters of Sen. John Kerry, had about 14,300 interested voters sign up on its website. Of those, the vast majority are from so-called "safe states" like Republican-dominated Texas or solidly Democratic California. The rest are voters from swing states who say they'd prefer to vote for a third-party candidate like Ralph Nader or Green Party nominee David Cobb, but are willing to vote for Kerry in order to prevent President Bush from winning re-election.
"Right now, we have a big imbalance," said Steve Yoder, a coordinator for the VotePair website. "We have a lot more registrants whose first choice is John Kerry and live in safe states than we have voters whose first choice is one of the third-party candidates and live in swing states."
Overall, Yoder said, participation levels are lower than in 2000, when a number of sites cropped up to minimize the impact of Nader on Democrat Al Gore's chances of victory. Through such websites as VoteSwap2000, votexchange2000 and Nadertrader.org, Yoder estimated that around 18,000 Nader supporters in swing states agreed to vote for Gore if a voter in a solidly pro-Bush or pro-Gore state agreed to vote for Nader in their stead.
This year, Yoder speculates that efforts by the Democratic Party to keep Nader off state ballots have alienated some of his supporters. However, VotePair is drawing interest from backers of other third-party candidates, like Cobb and Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party.
VotePair matches up voters from different states, who can communicate directly with each other by e-mail. So far, the site has arranged more than 1,500 "matches," in which a voter in a safe state agrees to vote for a third-party candidate if a swing state resident casts a ballot for Kerry.
Some voters, like Mike Caruso of Pinellas County, Florida, see vote swapping as a way to voice support for third-party candidates without jeopardizing the outcome of a race that will certainly be won by either a Republican or Democrat.
If Florida wasn't a crucial swing state, Caruso, a registered independent, said he would likely cast his vote for Nader. He would have done so in 2000, too, but opted instead to swap his vote with a man in Virginia.
"I support third-party candidates as an ideal," Caruso said. "I believe the Republicans and the Democrats are keeping good people with good ideas out of debates, and that's not right."
As a swing state voter, however, Caruso believes his vote will have more impact if it's cast for a major-party candidate.
"My views are slightly more aligned with the Democrats than they are with the Republicans," he said. "And a vote for a third party here is basically a vote against John Kerry."
Abraham Gutmann, a Green Party member and co-founder of Greens for Kerry, also believes voting for a third-party candidate would be a mistake in New Mexico, the swing state in which he lives. Rather than vote for Cobb, Gutmann has agreed to vote for Kerry. He's arranged an informal vote swap with his father-in-law, a resident of solidly Democratic Hawaii, who will vote for Cobb in Gutmann's stead.
"It's not an ideal world, and that's what people with Greens for Kerry and VotePair realize," Gutmann said. "We have two candidates, and one is going to be president. We want John Kerry to be that one."
