Swap My Vote

Creating the Sharing Democracy, two votes at a time…

[swapmyvote]

Email login and other features

We’ve been working hard to make Swap My Vote as powerful as possible and have some exciting news for you!

Email login

We have built the feature most requested by you! Now that we have mandatory mobile phone verification we felt we could now to introduce this. It’s been a massive effort on the part of our incredibly talented developer volunteers. 

Please let everyone know about this, as we think this could be the biggest way for use to reach and help the next untapped group of voters who want to make their votes count!

Improvements to swap options 

We're responding to what you and our community of vote swappers have asked for - we've started to make sure that some of the more marginal swaps available for your voting preferences are offered, rather than a random selection. 

We're aware that this might make it harder for some in safe seats to get a swap, but we also think it will help you have more electoral impact and for the Parliament to be more representative of your wishes. Please let us know any feedback on how you find this new feature!

Swap expiry time coming down! 

(From 48 to 24 hours, and just 12 from tonight!)

First Past the Post is no-one's friend (well, nearly no-one) and we need to help as many people find a swap as possible. So we've made proposed swaps expire sooner if they're not confirmed. Both partners should get an email reminding them to confirm, or to look for new swaps when proposed swaps expire.

And lots of other small things that hopefully improves the voter experience!

Between them I think these improvements could help us accelerate even more in terms of impact this election.

We are aware of a few glitches, including a change to Facebook privacy settings that makes it hard to reach some vote swap partners. If you logged in via Facebook and haven't been in touch with your partner, please do try to contact them as they may not be able to reach you. And if you are uncomfortable not being able to reach your partner, you can still reset your preferences to find a new swap (the FAQ has more details). We also know that if you’ve put your mobile number in wrong, it is difficult to verify it. Please know that our team of volunteers is working as quickly as possible to fix these and make vote swapping as pleasurable as a vote that counts.

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Swap My Vote is live for #GE2019

Swap My Vote is now open for vote swapping in the UK General election, on the 12th December 2019.

Click below to go and find a voting partner!

You can read about updates to the system here: http://bit.ly/swapmyvote-update-ge2019

FAQs are here: https://swapmyvote.uk/faq

There is more about the platform, including press and media coverage, here: forwarddemocracy.com/swapmyvote

Please help Swap My Vote reach more people this election - support our crowdfunder here: https://crowdfunder.co.uk/swapmyvote/ 

[swapmyvote]

Updating Swap My Vote for GE2019

[UPDATE, 3rd December: the site is live and you can login with Facebook and Twitter. You can see tactical recommendations in prospective partners’ constituencies. And much more - read on…]  

I wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to since that day in October that it became clear another election was on the way.

We’ve been flat out getting our systems and processes ready, and making a number of improvements to the Swap My Vote platform.

Some you will be able to see, but many are behind the scenes and will make the system more resilient in these testing times.

We are aiming to be live in the next few days, with two weeks to find a vote swap before the election.

We have updated our Facebook login process (they have changed their demands since 2017, and we have put the app in for review with them). This was the main thing that is was holding up launch, for which we are sorry — we will keep you updated as soon as we hear anything. We’ve also updated how we work with Twitter. [UPDATE: DONE]

We’re introducing mobile phone verification to help with trust in your voting partners.

Moved everything across to secure web connections (aka https).

We’ve fixed our API which is designed to let tactical recommendation sites send their visitors directly to Swap My Vote, auto-filling their tactical recommendation in our site.

This builds on our commitment to interoperability between civic and voter technology platforms (whilst respecting our users’ privacy).

We’ve also changed things under the hood so that our constituency data is all based on the official codes from the ONS, which is going to aid interoperability with other sites and data sets (such as tactical voting recommendation sites).

We’re going to protect your name in the system, until you have confirmed you’d like to swap votes with a prospective partner.

It’s at this point that we allow you to click through to each other’s social media profiles too, to help establish trust between you.

We’re going to give prospective voting partners just two days to confirm a proposed vote swap, after which time the swap will automatically cancel and the system will prompt you to choose a new prospective partner.

This is based on feedback from 2017, where some voters didn’t always hear back from their prospective partners in a timely fashion. Please make sure you can receive emails from [email protected] and if you aren’t sure whether you should have heard from us, check your ‘All Mail’ and junk folders.

New colours for 2019, as is now traditional! We’ve opted for a vibrant magenta, as it’s an eye catching colour and one that isn’t close to being used by a prominent political party (any more).

You can see our 2015, 2017, and now 2019 colour ways below!

As you know we have always taken great care with our users’ data and have never (and will never) sold advertising on the site or used personal targeting marketing techniques.

Having shown over two elections that the system works, and has real social impact, we wanted to make sure we were doing things right - and thankfully the recent introduction of the GDPR provides a useful framework to think about and review our policies about our users’ precious personal data.

If you would like to know about how we treat your data, please read more on our Privacy Policy, Cookie Notice, T&Cs, and FAQ pages.

On a different level, we formed a company (Forward Democracy) to act a ‘container’ for the project and other similar pro-democracy projects. You may be interested in our Save our Future WhatsApp cascades, designed to send your friends and family WhatsApp contacts and groups a message with a useful call to action to defend or otherwise promote democracy.

There has also been a huge amount of work done behind the scenes to streamline further development of the platform.

Some of the things we would like to do, if we can, include:

Showing tactical voting recommendations from a variety of sites for prospective swap partners’ constituencies [UPDATE: DONE]

Showing prospective swap partners’ constituencies leave and remain vote percentages

Letting people log in without social media

Offering more choice of political parties supported

Doing more to help people find swaps in certain constituencies

And more!

We couldn’t do all this without our wonderful community of volunteers, at least two of whom are working full time at the moment.

If you’d like to support what we are doing, please consider donating to our crowdfunder to help us reach more people than ever before, and make a real difference:

https://crowdfunder.co.uk/swapmyvote/

Thank you —

Forward!

[swapmyvote]

Working together, soon…

It’s a critical time in the country.

There are multiple threats to our democracy — our Government has attacked Parliament and the judiciary, and has given unlawful advice to the Monarch — and we have an electoral system that is not fit for purpose. Some of the parties’ central policy would see us having fewer votes, fewer elected representatives, and less influence in World affairs.

In society, a sense of division is rife.

With notable and honourable exceptions, some of the biggest political parties have not committed to working together, and some voters are tempted to stick with their tribe in the hope that they, against all odds, will be the winner that takes all. It is a gamble with our future.

Meanwhile, many are realising that, if the politicians can’t work together, they will have to do so themselves.

What if we — you, and me — could work together to create a better future?

Many now realise that tactical voting is the only way to see a Parliament that reflects their views.

Some 20% of voters voted tactically at the last election in 2017, and it was critical to the election result.

There are signs that more than 30% of people are considering voting tactically this time.

What is a voter to do if they want to support their party, but know that their vote will be wasted?

They should swap votes.

Someone else, somewhere else, feels exactly the same, in the opposite direction.

What unites these two voters is their desire for a better future, a better parliament, and a realisation that we are better when we work together.

Swap My Vote is launching this week for the General Election on the 12th December.

We will be helping people to make their one and only vote matter.

This is a critical election in the future of our country.

We (a small team of volunteers) have been working flat out behind the scenes to make sure the Swap My Vote platform is better, more resilient, and even more trustworthy than ever before.

We’ve had an unprecedented number of volunteer developer contributions and there’s a blog post here about the updates we’re introducing.

But the important thing to know is that we will be live in the next few days, and you will have two weeks or more to arrange a vote swap.

Thank you for bearing with us — what we’ve been doing takes quite some time to get right and we want to be ready for you when we open.

If you would like to help us reach as many people as possible this election and have the greatest impact, please consider sharing and donating to our Crowdfunder. Until now we’ve run on a shoestring - and we want to take things to the next level.

Find it here: https://crowdfunder.co.uk/swapmyvote/

Who knows what we can achieve this time, in 2019, if we work together?

Register now and get an email when Swap My Vote goes live, and share this post with your friends and family.

https://swapmyvote.uk

[swapmyvote]

6 things that happen on polling day

What happens on polling day in the Swap my Vote app?

On polling day, we will close the app for new swaps when the polls open at 7am.

If you have arranged a swap, you will receive an email reminding you to vote as you’ve discussed with your voting partner.

This email will have a link in it, which you can click to confirm you’ve voted.

Once you do so, an email will be sent to your partner to let them know.

This email will have the link for your partner to click to let you know they have voted.

That’s it! Democracy has been upgraded.

What if I haven’t arranged a swap?

If you haven’t managed to arrange a swap, you will receive an email to let you know.

You can obviously vote tactically or for your first choice party.

If a progressive vote is what is important to you, Tactical2017.com has been very popular this election. We are not aware of any similar site on the right of the political spectrum. If Brexit is your main concern, this Quartz piece may be for you.

Either way…

We love to see people tweeting and posting about swapping their vote on polling day. Use #SwapmyVote in your posts and we’ll look out to share some of the best!

What about after polling day?

One thing at a time!

Okay, well we recommend you give support to the call for electoral reform through organisations like Make Votes Matter and Electoral Reform Society.

The Swap my Vote team will have a short break and are thinking about how we can improve the platform, and continue to improve the democratic process between elections.

If you’d like to hear more, please signup here for the occasional email from us.

To a better democracy!

Swap my Vote Team

[swapmyvote]

Declining an interview

We just declined an interview with RT.

We told the producer it was because we have no wish to shine a light on the failings of the UK democratic system as part of Russia’s propaganda effort.

We hope we don’t get on some terrible list.

Full disclosure: we did do one interview with them in 2015. They were one of the first organisations to take an interest in Swap my Vote and whilst we knew they were Russian (as is one of our founders, to the tune of 25%), we were naive about the channel’s guiding principles.

We wanted to let people know about the site. About half an hour before the Skype call, rushing around the garden to find a good spot for light and quiet, we realised they were going to ask ‘how broken is western democracy?’ or similar.

We concocted a long positive answer about how both in the UK and the US we are free to speak about and influence the democratic process, which can’t be said in all countries.

About how freedom of speech is sacred and must be protected at all costs, etc.

Needless to say, they didn’t use that bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekUjJRB8C7c

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This is what democracy looks like

Swap my Vote is a web platform that helps make votes matter. 

People who feel their votes are wasted (74.4% in 2015′s UK General Election) can swap their vote with each other, each being cast in a constituency where they have a chance of returning a winning candidate. Both partners get to vote for who they really want, and help someone else do the same.

We’ve run an analysis on the political parties to and from which voters are willing to swap their votes. This is what it looks like so far, with a week to go the election.

It’s not a massive surprise that much of the activity is on the progressive left; it adds weight to the movement for tactical voting and a Progressive Alliance as called for by Tactical2017.com and Compass, not to mention anti-Hard Brexit campaigns such as Best for Britain and More United.   

What might strike some as surprising is the degree of movement across the traditional left-right axis - there isn’t much, but it is still more than one might expect. One might put this down to voters rejecting their tribal allegiances in the light of a more polarised political spectrum. 

The small numbers of voters flowing back to their preferred party are probably just checking out the platform, perhaps while they work out for whom they want to vote; setting one’s preferences thus is currently the best way to avoid getting into a swap.

Tactical voting and swapping on the right has always been a real minority sport, but as the Conservatives have adopted a hard Brexit stance, hoovering up Ukip support, and uniting the right of the spectrum, it is numerically insignificant.

This is what democracy - a thousand grassroots conversations and alliances - looks like.

To find your voting partner and make your vote count for more, head to http://swapmyvote.uk

[swapmyvote]

Swap my Vote API

Swap my Vote now has an API

This means that any voter recommendation, matching, or tactical site can use a link/button to send a voter to a web address which will pre-populate their voting preferences, allowing for a relatively frictionless journey for the voter.

For example*: if you would like to vote Green, but are prepared to vote Labour in a swap, you can click www.swapmyvote.org/uk/swap?preferred_party_name=green_party&willing_party_name=labour and those vote-swapping preferences will be automatically filled in for you. 

*We have prepared a table of short links for use by campaigning organisations and voting alliances here.

Swap my Vote API v1.0

We currently have a single end point to pre-populate some of the fields that a user can choose:

http://www.swapmyvote.org/uk/swap

Parameters should be passed in the query string, e.g.

http://www.swapmyvote.uk/uk/swap?preferred_party_name=labour

Available parameters are:

preferred_party_name - The party that the user would ideally like to vote for, say if all votes counted equally nationally.

willing_party_name - The party that the user is willing to vote for, say tactically.

The party names should be lowercased and use underscores instead of spaces. We support 7 parties at the moment, with the follow canonical names on Swap my Vote:

labour

liberal_democrats

green_party

conservatives

ukip

snp

plaid_cymru

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In case you missed them at the time - here are the radio interviews we did during the General Election 2015.

What a difference a few days make!

[swapmyvote]

Voteswap - or #SwapmyVote?

It was great to see voteswap.org getting some good exposure yesterday - we welcome them with open arms to the growing movement for a better democracy. There is much to applaud in the platform, not least some great analysis and statistical integration.

As BuzzFeed UK notes, "The problem, however, occurs when you enter in a seat where both Labour and the Greens might win and users are told to vote based on their principles. So Labour supporters are never told to vote for the Greens in seats they might actually win.". We at Swap my Vote believe in a vote swapping platform as a strategy to affect one or more of a number of shifts in how democracy functions. We are keen to distinguish this from tactical voting which, while valid in its own right, is relatively limited in what it achieves in any given electoral cycle.

Further, we believe that by focusing our innovations purely on the left, we risk making electoral reform a partisan aim - where better representation and democracy should be the province of all.

Lastly, and importantly, we believe in using social media transparently to introduce voters to each other, putting all the power we can back into voters' hands - and starting to create a totally new paradigm of a ‘Sharing Democracy’.

However it happens, Internet enabled vote swapping is clearly an idea whose time has come. Together let’s build a richer and more representative system - and a better future.

http://swapmyvote.uk

#swapmyvote

[swapmyvote]

How a blog post became a platform for change #swapmyvote.

It was 2010 and the General Election was upon us. After years of voting tactically, even having once or twice spoiled my ballot paper, I was frustrated not to be able to use my vote to be part of electing the first Green MP in the UK, in the constituency where I used to live. I had a choice between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives, who of course went on to form the first coalition government in decades.

But I had been inspired by what could happen when people got together to hack around issues. I wrote a blog post. What if we created a platform where you could swap your vote with someone in another constituency, so that both of you know your votes have counted towards actual representation in parliament, rather than just a number of wasted votes? I put the blog post out and sent it to a few friends who knew the scene. Inspired by the recent snow, and its #UKSnow map, I even suggested a Twitter protocol for it. I waited for feedback.

Not a lot happened.

Until 2014 when James was looking around to see if anyone else had had a similar idea, searched for #swapmyvote. He got in touch, and with his experience building a collaboration platform for scientists, and mine working on social and multiplatform strategies for big television shows, we had a call or two on Skype. We immediately got on.

We decided we’d do the initial development over Christmas, and start spreading the word in spring. Well, things always take a bit longer than you expect, but here we are with a few weeks till the election, with a working platform, and gathering new voters using the platform each day.

Join in at swapmyvote.uk.