Vote Trading

[Matt]

I'd like to know if some of our legal eagles (Ric_Flair, Smmemen) could answer this for me:

In 2000, some clever people decided to try vote trading, by which I mean: you hook up with someone in a different state and have each other trade votes. This was done so that Greens in swing states wouldn't have to worry about giving Bush that state's electoral votes, while still counting one vote towards Nader's hoped-for 5% (the amount of votes you have to get to recieve federal matching funs the next time around).

While there are definitely laws against buying and selling votes, the issue of trading votes was murky. Was there ever a ruling about this?

[Dr. Sylvan]

As long as there's no money involved I can't imagine this being illegal.

IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), but as far as the law is concerned, you've been persuaded to vote a certain way in the same manner as if you had a discussion with someone.

[Sylvester]

Of course, AFAIK, there's no way you can prove you voted how you said you would, which thwarts both this and other schemes involving money/extortion.

[Jacob Orlove]

Of course, AFAIK, there's no way you can prove you voted how you said you would, which thwarts both this and other schemes involving money/extortion.

Well, you could both sign a contract, but then you get into the legality issue.

[Ric_Flair]

In the 20th Century voting became more regulated than ever.  Because of the Jim Crow laws, even after the passing of the 14th Amendment there was no real enforcement of voting rights for blacks.  Thus Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The Supreme Court also held in the same decade that poll taxes, tests, and other restrictions on voting are strictly prohibited because voting was a fundamental right under the due process clause (that is, it is necessary in a scheme of ordered liberty).  As such these two federal statements seem to be the only relevant way to approach interstate vote trading.  Clearly no state could prosecute a person in another state for voting one way or another.  The only way I could see reaching this action would be as a violation of the VRA or somehow showing that the trading scheme violated the Supreme Court requirement of one person one vote.

I would say that without doing extensive research, the VRA is probably the most complex piece of legislation and body of law examined in all of the law school (yes, more so than anti-trust or patent law), that the scheme is permissible.  One possible way would be to show that in a covered jurisdiction (a jurisdiction which has a history of discrimination in voting and is "watched" by the DOJ) black votes are being diluted by a trading scheme.  The issue though is how to tie this with state action, which is required in order to make out a VRA claim.  Even if you could show effects similar to a VRA violation with the scheme I don't think you could show any state action (which includes state actors and those acting as agents for the state, like roving bands of deputized rednecks terrorizing black voters).  

Without doing lots of research, I would think that this scheme is fine, but that is just a guess.