Swap your vote, go to jail. That's the message from California Secretary of State Bill Jones, whose office Monday night warned the owners of the vote-trading site Voteswap2000 that their site was in violation of California state law.
"Your website specifically offers to broker the exchange of votes throughout the United States of America," said the secretary's letter to site owners Jim Cody and Ted Johnson. "This activity is a corruption of the voting process in violation of Elections Code sections 18521 and 18522 as well as Penal Code section 182, criminal conspiracy."
Johnson and Cody immediately shut down their site, which had been established to let Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader win 5 percent of the popular vote, while allowing Vice President Al Gore to win the White House.
On a message posted on their site, the owners said, "We recommend that anyone who has already agreed to swap should check with the laws of their own state to make sure there is no violation. Our advice is to err on the side of caution, and if you can't determine for sure that you are not in violation of any laws, you should not participate in vote-swapping."
According to Shad Balch, a spokesman for Jones, Voteswap2000 was pursued because it is in Los Angeles, "so we knew they were in our immediate jurisdiction," he said.
Voteswap2000, Balch said, was "inducing" others to vote for a specific candidate. "The law says that a person shall not directly or through any other person induce any other person to vote or refrain from voting for any particular person or measure," he said, paraphrasing the statute.
Asked whether it would be illegal, then, to informally agree with a friend in another state to "trade" your vote with him, Balch said, "Absolutely, absolutely."
"That would be a direct corruption of the voting process," he said.
Although Voteswap2000 has taken down its site, other trading sites, including Votexchange2000 and WinWin Campaign, are still online.
Jeff Winchell, who runs a site called Nader's Traders from Seattle, said that he will not take down his site because of the California law.
"I talked to my own lawyer about this," he said, "and he thought that the California thing was baloney. He said, 'Go to jail, it'll be worth it.'"
Winchell just might face such a predicament, as Balch said that Jones was considering "aggressively pursuing" other sites that encourage trading, even those not based in California.
It is uncertain, though, whether Jones could get very far if he tried to prosecute the owners of these sites.
Jamin Raskin, a professor of constitutional law at American University, said that he knew of no legal problems concerning vote trading. He said that it's worth noting that trading is done every day in Congress.
"Senators often say, 'If you vote for my trade bill, I'll vote for your highway bill.' So if this was illegal, the whole U.S. Senate would be in jail," he said.
