This vote-swapping service wants to help Democrats conflicted over the Gaza war cast ‘protest votes’ while still opposing Trump

While the Democratic party may be united in the need to defeat Donald Trump in this presidential election, some members may also be feeling conflicted about voting for Kamala Harris. In particular, one major issue is the ongoing war in Gaza, with some voicing concerns that a Harris administration’s handling of the war could look very similar to the current Biden administration policy.

For those people, who might want to vote for a third-party candidate but still want to make sure their vote counts against Trump, a vote-swapping service called Swap Your Vote could provide an alternative.

Swap Your Vote works by matching voters in states that are safely blue with voters in swing states. According to the site, it’s “a conversation and a pledge to one another. Both the swing-state voter and the safe-state voter agree to a political coalition-building strategy that advances their interests, which is similar to many other common political deals.”

Swapping allows a voter in a blue state, like New York or California, to cast a vote for a third party, knowing a voter they get matched with in an all-important swing state, like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, or Michigan, will cast a ballot for Harris.

Vote-swapping is legal, and seems to be an underutilized tool in a system where a few swing states end up deciding our elections. There is no way to enforce it; it’s basically an honor system. But the idea is that it could motivate would-be third-party voters in swing states, or people who wouldn’t have voted at all, to vote blue.

However, it’s worth noting that because there’s no way to enforce the “deals” made between swing-state and safe-state voters, there is the possibility that that the system could also be used by voters of opposing parties in bad faith.

Why use vote-swapping?

Swap Your Vote was started just weeks ago by Rae Abileah, a Jewish faith worker and activist, who spent the bulk of her twenties doing anti-war organizing.

Abileah felt stuck between a rock and a hard place as far as her feelings about voting for Harris, she tells Fast Company. The founder, who has family in Israel, said she believes it’s essential to “keep pressure on progressives on other issues like Gaza,” but also believes we “have to defeat Trump,” meaning she was in a complete “conundrum.”

Abileah says inspiration also came from the 2000 election—the first in which she was old enough to vote: “I remember vote-swapping in 2000 and I remembered how close it was.” But that time, vote-swapping didn’t make a big enough impact to change the outcome of the election.

“I often reflect on the different world we would live in in terms of the Iraq war if we had had Al Gore,” Abileah says. According to Swap Your Vote, “if only another 0.6% of Ralph Nader’s voters in Florida had vote-paired—if about 2,000 Nader supporters had paired instead of 1,400—Al Gore would have carried the election.”

While hundreds of thousands of voters across the country stand firm in either red or blue camps, many voters, like Abileah, are still conflicted about who to cast their ballot for on election day. For many Americans, that’s not because they don’t know what they believe, but rather because they feel neither the Democratic nor Republican nominees are worthy of their vote. For example, a voter who might not want to see a second Trump presidency, but feels a vote for Harris is an endorsement of policies they don’t agree with, may be inclined not to vote for either candidate.

Divided on the war in Gaza

According to a May 2024 Data for Progress survey, an overwhelming majority (70%) of Americans want a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and more than half believe Israel is committing genocide. As the number of deaths in Palestine has grown well past 43,000, with an estimated 20,000 children orphaned, and at least 1,400 people killed in Lebanon, an increasing number of Americans are disagreeing with the argument that Israel’s (U.S.-funded) bombs are in self-defense.

The Biden administration has spent an estimated $17.9 billion on sending military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023. Meanwhile, there’s been a growing call for Vice President Harris to differentiate herself from Biden’s handling of the conflict, but that hasn’t exactly happened.

In a recent CNN town hall, a voter asked Harris a pointed question about the conflict: “What would you do as president to ensure that not another Palestinian dies due to bombs being funded by U.S. tax dollars?” In response, Harris called the deaths of Palestinians “unconscionable,” but didn’t lay out plans for changing course and quickly changed the subject. “For many people who care about this issue, they also care about bringing down the price of groceries,” Harris replied.

Exchanges like this have led some voters, who were hoping to feel positively about voting for Harris, to instead feel it’s out of the question. Swap Your Vote cofounder Kipchoge Spencer, who is also the founder of the Landslide relational organizing voter app, tells Fast Company it’s those devastated voters who are most likely to use Swap Your Vote. “I think there are a lot of users from different perspectives, but in our experience the primary user is people who are heartbroken around the war in Palestine,” he says.

With just days until the election, the service is just getting off the ground. But Spencer says that those who find the site are excited. “We’re just trying to tap every likely avenue that we can to get it in front of as many people as possible,” he says. “There is a very particular audience who is extremely encouraged and engaged by our message.”

For Abileah, the movement is not just about votes, but about people coming together—connecting to make their voices heard. “We can leverage our collective power to build a strong progressive movement for real tangible wins,” she says.