Is vote pairing legal?
Yes, of course, it is a form of political association and expression protected by the First Amendment. No state even tried to make vote-pairing or ‘vote-trading’ illegal in 2000 and none of the tens of thousands of people who did it were ever prosecuted for anything. The reason people wonder about this is that six Republican state secretaries of state, led by California’s Bill Jones, tried to shut down the movement in 2000 by claiming that vote-trading is a form of vote-buying and selling. This is absurd since nothing of material value ever changes hands. Yet, facing a series of hysterical criminal prosecution threats from these partisan officials, some website operators reluctantly shut their sites down–which almost certainly affected the outcome of the election. The ACLU and the National Voting Rights Institute, assisted by Harvard Law Professors Laurence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz and American University Law Professor Jamin Raskin, promptly brought a free speech lawsuit seeking reli
