This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
Many left-leaning Americans, and Arab American communities 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. So more than 10,000 of them have found a simple solution: vote swapping.
While some people have arranged to swap votes with friends and family members, Swap Your Vote is also an official movement that connects voters in swing states with voters in solidly blue states, promising two “protest votes” in a blue state for every one vote for Harris in a swing state. 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 until an hour before the polls close on Election Day. The organization encourages the groups of voters to talk 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 urged voters to mark “uncommitted” on their ballots in the primaries in protest of U.S. support for the Israel-Hamas war, has avoided endorsing Harris, even while telling supporters to prevent Trump from winning. Its co-founder, Abbas Alawiah, 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 another Pennsylvania voter promised to vote for Harris if her blue state connections would vote for 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 Reverend 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.”