What Is VotePact and Can It End the Establishment Duopoly?

You and a friend can save each other from one voting for Trump and the other for Biden. Dialogue. Pair up. Vote your conscience super-strategically.

Given the seemingly grim prospects for this presidential election and the dynamics around the duopoly that help spawn disaster after disaster, I'm happy to relaunch my VotePact.org project, which literally opens the door to antiestablishment candidates winning office:

The Problem

Most voters don’t vote for—often don’t even consider voting for—third parties because they view voting for a third party as helping the establishment party they most hate. Disenchanted Democrats continue to vote for Democrats because they don’t want Republicans; disenchanted Republicans continue to vote for Republicans because they don’t want Democrats. Both are trapped by fear and loathing.

VotePact.org—The Solution

Disenchanted Republicans should dialogue and pair up with disenchanted Democrats and both vote for third party or independent candidates. That is, instead of you and a friend canceling out each other’s votes, one self-loathingly voting for Biden and the other for Trump, you vote for the third-party candidates you actually want. You both get to vote your preference without helping the candidate you most dislike.

VotePact frees up votes in pairs from each of the establishment parties. This liberates the voters to push the lever for their actual preference from among those on the ballot, rather than just pick the “least bad” of the two majors. It doesn’t change the balance between the establishment parties, but “syphons off” votes from them equally. The pair could each vote for different candidates, or they could vote for the same candidate. If the latter, it could open the path to an actual electoral victory for an enterprising independent candidate.

How does this work? Are you hooking people up?

Right now we’re not connecting people directly. There’s an X/Twitter account and a Facebook page that might help people do that. We’re mostly asking people to find people in their life—friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors, and so on—and talk to them about this—they can find a “vote buddy.” But we’re open to help from folks to try to figure out ways to use the Internet to connect people from different parties. This is a volunteer effort. We definitely encourage people to write up their efforts, make videos about them, perhaps with their “vote buddy” and post these. (In 2016, a well-funded PAC backing Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson rebranded the VotePact idea as “The Balanced Rebellion” and set up software to connect people, got 37 million views on Facebook with an entertaining video featuring “dead Abe Lincoln” and helped Johnson score the biggest third party success since Ross Perot.)

Are you just trying to help a particular candidate?

We’re trying to free people from the fear of voting for candidates that actually represent their beliefs because all they can see is the potential negative consequences. Over the years, real independents, principled progressives, libertarians, authentic conservatives, and others have been unrelentingly manipulated by the establishments of the two major parties. They should wake up to the fact that they can join together, rather than be kept apart by establishment party apparatchiks who exploit their fear to maintain the ruling duopoly. It can lead to an independent or emerging party candidate winning. 

But isn’t there robust debate between the Republicans and Democrats?

Both establishments of the Republican and Democratic Parties are at odds with a large portion of the US public on a host of issues: economic policies that favor the connected, corporate power, power of Big Tech and Wall Street, curtailing civil liberties, aggressive militarism, backing Israeli genocide, corporate trade deals, fossil fuel subsidies, creating more deadly pathogens, the “drug war”, etc. Many people who don’t support these policies are trapped in the two-party system. We’re offering them a way to help free themselves. Obama (from the left) and Trump (from the right) have won elections promising to meaningfully challenge many establishment policies and have not done so. The public is hungry for real change that takes on the establishment but keeps getting trapped by political figures of various flavors who don’t deliver and instead actually perpetuate the establishment duopoly.

Achieving Dialogue

VotePact would facilitate and would be propelled by meaningful dialogue on issues by citizens. This would likely emphasize issues in which the establishment parties have most colluded: constitutional powers, issues of war, corporate-dominated trade, infringement on civil liberties and big money in politics to name a few. Given high negatives of Biden and Trump, there are likely millions of people wanting a path to voting for independent parties. This could in fact constitute a majority. The creative powers of citizens will likely produce “pair ups” that no political consultant could possibly have predicted. This could achieve a steady stream of novel news stories.

The Voting Precursors

The VotePact idea is not dissimilar from how politicians actually act towards one another—one votes other’s project in return for favor. The politicians manipulate the voting system all the time for narrow interests; the people should be able to vote in a manner which maximizes the public interest. Note that VotePact wouldn’t be needed if rank choice voting or score voting or similar systems were adopted, but the establishment has prevented such reforms. VotePact can thus be seen as “do-it-yourself” voting reform. But VotePact has advantages even over such reforms: help force meaningful dialogue between unlikely protagonists, potentially leading to healthier political culture and given its grassroots nature, could rapidly spread under the right circumstances.

I’m Already Planning on Voting for an Independent Candidate, Could this Apply to Me?

Not directly, but you can play “match maker” for others. For example, friends may approach you—perhaps with the intent to “bring you to your senses” to instill fear that your vote might help the establishment candidate they most dislike. You can turn the tables on them and show them how they could vote for independent or emerging party candidates too. 

The Campaign Strategy

A campaign able to tap into both would-be Democratic and would-be Republican voters could do the following: Get endorsements in pairs—a former union official who has always voted Democratic with a small business owner who has always voted Republican, for example. They would each give their reasons for voting for the candidate at a news conference, which would end with the candidate bringing them together, both shaking hands with the candidate in the middle. Thus the candidate is seen as bringing people together, ending the partisan bickering and moving people forward together in a positive direction. This will be an example for other people, giving them ideas for how they can “pair up” with someone else. The creative powers of the citizenry could then be set free in a novel manner. Groups like “Democrats for Candidate X” and “Republicans for Candidate X” could be brought together and pair people up.

Turning the “Spoiler” Question Around

VotePact is in a sense self-promoting; that is, it answers the perennial “aren’t you a spoiler?” question in a direct manner. Independent candidates and others have rarely forthrightly addressed this issue. It does so in part by putting the onus on the questioner—by finding their “political mirror image”—to find a way out for themselves. The question is answered thus, for example: “I understand your concern: you really don’t want the Republican to win, so you’d rather vote for the Democrat even though you really want to vote for me. There’s a way out for you: Join with someone in your life, someone you know and trust, a relative, a friend, a coworker, who prefers the Republican—and both agree to vote for me (or your friend can vote for some other third party candidate). This solution requires work, but it gets you political freedom. There’s a way out of your dilemma, I hope you’ll take it. People all over the world and throughout history have risked their lives and fortunes for political freedom. People in the US today should be able to exert the emotional and mental strength to join with someone they disagree with to emancipate themselves from the two-party duopoly.”

The Issue of Trust

There is the issue of how the people can trust one another to actually vote for who they say they’ll vote for; this is similar to the classic “prisoner’s dilemma.” The major answer to this fear is dialogue, dialogue and more dialogue—for the people to really talk through what they want and to develop trust in the political realm that they have in other areas of life, as friends, co-workers or neighbors. This interweaves the personal and political. This is part of the reason we’re not connecting people. We’re encouraging people to pair up with people they already know and trust. This way, they avoid cancelling out each other’s votes. These relatives and friends might actually avoid talking politics, since they know they disagree. VotePact uses that disagreement to their mutual advantage. The political establishment wants you to not talk about your beliefs with people you care about. To do so is genuinely revolutionary in the best sense.

Another alternative is to each get absentee ballots, fill them out together and mail them together. (Some states allow you to vote on the day of the election and override your absentee ballot, so check your local regulations before you do this.)

Creating a Multi-Way Race

However, if VotePact has a substantial impact, it will affect the polling results (skewed as those sometimes are) and therefore its major consequence would be to let people see the viability of an independent run. That is, VotePact helps the scales to drop from the peoples’ eyes so they can judge candidates on their merits rather than being confined to the Democratic-Republican horse race. Once this happens, trust in effect becomes less of an issue as the illusion of inevitability of Republican-Democratic dominance is shattered. Think of the success of Jesse Ventura; or that the Greens in Germany were fond of saying that they are not from the left or right, but out in front.

What it’s not

This is not “vote swapping”—in which voters in so-called “swing” states who want to vote for third parties vote for establishment candidates because they’ve “swapped” votes with committed Democrats and Republicans who vote Green or Libertarian in so-called “safe” states. This was advocated by VotePair.org and VoteTrader.org, which got lots of media coverage, both now defunct. Unlike “swapping,” VotePact is not an attempt to “minimize the damage” of a third party run—it is designed to actually shake up the political spectrum, create a realignment and open the door to actual victory for independents or emerging parties. Also, VotePact does not result in people voting for candidates they don’t want—it frees people to vote for candidates they do want, but are held back by fear because of the limitations of the voting system. While the Electoral College is central to “vote swapping,” it is not at all central to VotePact, though VotePact does work best if the two voters are in the same state.

But Independent Parties and Candidates are a Joke

Often third party candidates “run” for office without the slightest thought that they can actually win. This mindset has often attracted candidates that are more “protest votes” to “send a message” rather than people who seriously expect to get elected. VotePact seeks to overturn this mindset. A movement along these lines, realigning the political spectrum and asserting an authentic antiestablishment center, should be able to manifest the individuals who could actually win.

See: VotePact.org