Vote Pairing - United States Presidential Election, 2000

United States Presidential Election, 2000

The debate regarding the legality of vote pairing peaked during the 2000 presidential election, when there was a strong effort to shut down the US vote-pairing web sites. However, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals eventually ruled against this action, and by the 2004 presidential election there was no such effort to shut down vote pairing.

The debate intensified in the final days of the 2000 election when six Republican state secretaries of state, led by the California state secretary of state, Bill Jones, charged that vote-pairing web sites were illegal and threatened criminal charges against their creators. Multiple web sites had sprung up that were matching supporters of the Democratic presidential candidate, Al Gore, in nonswing states, with supporters in swing states of the strongest third party candidate, Ralph Nader. Some argued that Ralph Nader was drawing support from left leaning Democrats that would otherwise vote for Al Gore. This would have allowed Nader to get more of the popular vote, or at least his fair share of it, and at the same time allowed Gore to perhaps get more of the Electoral College vote.

There are multiple reasons it would be important for Ralph Nader to still get his share of the national popular vote. One is that if he got five percent or more, then he could get federally distributed public funding in the next election. Also, and perhaps more importantly, he could possibly get included in the presidential debates for the next election in 2004. Third parties have protested their exclusion from the presidential debates.

In 2000, many of the vote pairing web sites were hosted in California, and so when the California state secretary of state, Bill Jones, charged that the web sites were illegal and threatened their creators with criminal prosecution, some (but not all) of the sites reluctantly shut down. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) got involved to protect the web sites, seeking a restraining order against Jones and then a permanent injunction against him, alleging that he had violated the constitutional rights of the web site creators. However, the issue would only be resolved after the 2000 election had already occurred. The media at the time gave little coverage to vote pairing, except for how it was being charged as illegal.

It is possible that Jones's threats of criminal charges against the creators of the vote-pair web sites changed the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. One of the web sites, votetrader.org, tallied the number of people that had registered to pair their votes on all the vote-pairing web sites. They tallied that 1,412 Nader supporters in Florida had gotten matched with Gore supporters from Republican states (although more likely vote paired with relatives and friends in other states—instead of over the Internet). George W. Bush was certified as winning Florida by only 537 votes—by Florida's controversial Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. The Florida Supreme Court then changed this margin to just 193 votes at most, in their ruling on December 8, 2004. Approximately 2,900,000 people voted for George W. Bush and Al Gore each in Florida, while the number that voted for Ralph Nader was certified at 97,421. If only another 0.2% of the voters for Ralph Nader in Florida had vote paired (about 200 divided by 97,421)--if about 1,600 Nader supporters had vote paired instead of 1,400--Al Gore would have carried the election.

There were numerous other controversies in Florida's vote count: from the Palm Beach County butterfly ballots; to the question of whether Bush would have still won the state in a full recount; to how Katherine Harris, a Republican, was the cochair of the Bush campaign in Florida at the same time she was the Florida state secretary of state. Notably, the California state secretary of state, Bill Jones, who charged that the votepairing web sites were illegal, was also a Republican supporter of George W. Bush. The federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would eventually rule against him, but this decision did not come down until February 6, 2003, long after the 2000 election was already over. In the next presidential election, in 2004, the legality of the votepairing web sites went unquestioned. Indeed, the California state secretary of state for the 2004 election (a successor to Bill Jones) publicly announced, before that election, that vote pairing was legal.