Think your vote won't count at the general election? Here's how to swap it

Voters are using the power of the web to find new ways to make their voices heard – and overcome the frustration of the first-past-the-post electoral system

The practice of trading votes to make your ballot count in the first-past-the-post voting system has become increasingly popular (PA)

Under Britain’s antiquated first-past-the-post voting system, your vote doesn’t always count. As a result, people sometimes turn to tactical voting.

In 2017, the concept seems to be more in vogue than ever before. Chatter of a “progressive alliance” on the left has reached fever pitch and some local parties have stood down in certain seats to give their allies a better chance of winning. On the right, too, Ukip has stood down against strongly pro-Brexit, mostly Tory, candidates so as not to split the Eurosceptic vote.

Such alliances are temporary solutions that would be unnecessary were Britain to overhaul its voting system to get rid of “wasted” votes. But the current setup mostly benefits the largest parties, and change is unlikely after voters rejected the Alternative Vote in a referendum in 2011.

But what happens if there’s no alliance in your seat and you still want your single vote to count? Tom de Grunwald, a producer based in Cambridge, is taking electoral reform into his own hands to solve that problem.

Before the last election in 2015 Mr De Grunwald set up a website called Swap My Vote, a “hack” to create electoral reform “two votes at a time”. The idea is to match up people to swap their votes between constituencies, to bypass the problems with first-past-the-post. “Personally I would rather it not be necessary and there be a proportional system. I think it’s really important for democracy,” he told The Independent. But in the meanwhile, Swap My Vote fills a niche. “It’s essentially about making people’s votes count for more by minimising wasted votes. Strategically it’s about creating electoral reform – if we can’t have it in law, then at least we can create it ourselves.”

The service asks people what party they’d ideally like to vote for, and then the parties they’d be happy to vote for tactically in a trade. It then matches them with other voters who they can swap with. Someone who lives in a constituency where Labour cannot win but wants to vote Labour can, for example, get someone else to vote Labour for them in a marginal seat where they have a chance; they in turn cast their own ballot for another party specified by the person they swapped with.

Importantly, the site isn’t aimed at supporters of particular party, it’s simply an exchange service where voters who feel disenfranchised can meet. That’s what differentiates Swap My Vote from VoteSwap 2015, a similar service that operated at the last election on a specifically partisan basis to swap Green and Labour voters.

The non-partisan approach leads Mr De Grunwald to see Swap My Vote as one example of a wider family of digital democracy tools – websites and services built to use technology to enhance politics.

Some of these online tools have proved revolutionary that we can already scarcely imagine life without them. Until the advent of the internet it was surprisingly difficult to find out how your own MP had voted on any given issue, with the division lists only available in physical printed form from Parliament. Now, websites such as Public Whip and TheyWorkForYou bring information that is still difficult to find on Parliament’s own official sites to interested voters at the touch of a smartphone screen.

One possible dark side to this increased transparency and access is that the ability to scrutinise an MP’s personal record has grown hand-in-hand with increased abuse of elected representatives on social media, with Parliament’s head of security warning earlier this year that ethnic minority and women MPs were most regularly targeted online. But these tools nevertheless empower voters and improve democracy.

Democracy Club CVs, which launched at the 2015 election, collects online versions of the CVs of parliamentary candidates who voters might otherwise know little about. Another service, called Members Interests, provides a browser plug-in that highlights MPs’ names in any news articles that a user reads. Clicking on an MP’s name reveals who has given them money or gifts, as recorded in Parliament’s records. This can provide useful context when reading, say, an article where an MP is quoted talking about a country to which he’s already visited on an all expenses paid junket.

Swap My Vote isn’t yet as influential as some of these other systems. But at the last election 10,000 votes were swapped between registered voters – potentially enough to swing a key marginal or two.

A set of programming standards known as an API is being drawn up by Mr De Grunwald and his coder co-founder, which would allow other sites to integrate with Swap My Vote. So a person might take a policy quiz on one website, be told party whose policies best matched up with their opinions, and then be directed to Swap My Vote if it was the most sensible way to vote for that party in their constituency.

It all sounds interesting, but could it be open to abuse? Couldn’t someone say they’d vote one way on your behalf, and then not do it? “Ultimately, people casting their vote, it’s up to them to cast it and you can’t check up on that in any way,” Mr De Grunwald admits. But he says there are some safeguards built into the swapping system.

People tend to swap votes within the parties of the left or within the parties of the right, so the danger of outright fraud is reduced. The site also uses a bit of psychology, putting users in touch with each other on social media to personalise the experience and help voters to sniff out fakes. And, of course, these votes weren’t likely to count towards the final result anyway without the swap so the danger of exploitation is minimal.

Whether Swap My Vote changes the result in any constituency is almost missing the point. The fact that such a service is necessary is a depressing commentary on the effectiveness of Britain’s old fashioned voting system.