Editing Vote pairing (section)

==== 2000 United States presidential election ====
{{main article |2000 United States presidential election |2000 United States presidential election in Florida}}
The debate over the legality of vote swapping intensified in the final days of the 2000 election when six Republican state secretaries of state, led by the [[Secretary of State of California|California Secretary of State]] [[Bill Jones (California politician)|Bill Jones]], charged that vote-pairing web sites were illegal and threatened criminal charges against their creators. Multiple web sites had sprung up that were matching supporters of the Democratic presidential candidate, [[Al Gore]], in non-swing states, with supporters in [[swing state]]s of the strongest third-party candidate, Ralph Nader. Some argued that Ralph Nader was drawing support from left leaning Democrats that would otherwise vote for Al Gore. This would have allowed Nader to get more of the popular vote, or at least his fair share of it, and at the same time allowed Gore to perhaps get more of the [[United States Electoral College|Electoral College]] vote.

There are multiple reasons it would be important for Ralph Nader to still get his share of the national popular vote. One is that if he got five percent or more, then he could get federally distributed public funding in the next election. Also, and perhaps more importantly, he could possibly get included in the [[United States presidential election debates|presidential debates]] for the [[2004 United States presidential debates|next election in 2004]]. Third parties have protested their exclusion from the presidential debates.

In 2000, many of the vote pairing web sites were hosted in California, and so when the California Secretary of State, Bill Jones, charged that the web sites were illegal and threatened their creators with criminal prosecution, some (but not all) of the sites reluctantly shut down. The [[American Civil Liberties Union]] (ACLU) got involved to protect the web sites, seeking a restraining order against Jones and then a permanent injunction against him, alleging that he had violated the constitutional rights of the web site creators. However, the issue would only be resolved after the 2000 election had already occurred.

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right"
|-
! Votes swapped to Gore in Florida
| 1412
|-
! Bush's margin in final recount
| 537
|-
! Bush's margin in Dec 8 ruling
| 193
|}

It is possible that Jones's threats, which shut down several vote-swapping websites, changed the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. After the election, votetrader.org tallied up the total number of voter swaps across all vote-swapping websites at 16,024, of which 1,412 were Nader-to-Gore voters in Florida.<ref>{{cite web |title=Election 2000 Vote Swapping Results |publisher=VoteTrader.org |url=http://votetrader.org/2000/results/ |url-status=dead |archive-date=May 26, 2004 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20040526011855/http://votetrader.org/2000/results/}}</ref> [[Florida Secretary of State]] [[Katherine Harris]] certified [[George W. Bush]] as winning Florida by just 537 votes, and certified [[Ralph Nader]] as winning 97,421 votes.<ref name=CNN2000 /> Under this standard, if another 550 voters had swapped (about 0.5% of Nader's total), then Gore would have won. In their ruling on December 8, 2004, the [[Florida Supreme Court]] changed this margin to just 193 votes.<ref name=CNN2000>{{cite news |publisher=[[CNN]] |title=Voter Results in Florida |date=December 14, 2000 |url=http://www9.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/FL/frameset.exclude.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=January 23, 2001 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20010123141300/http://www9.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/results/FL/frameset.exclude.html |quote=Nov. 7 1,725, Recount 930, Certified 537, 12/8 Ruling 193}}</ref> Under this standard, if another 200 voters had swapped (about 0.2% of Nader's total), then Gore would have won. Put another way: If about 1,600 Nader supporters had vote paired instead of 1,400, Gore would have carried the election.

There were numerous other controversies in Florida's vote count: from the Palm Beach County butterfly ballots; to the question of whether Bush would have still won the state in a full recount; to how [[Katherine Harris]], a Republican, was the co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida at the same time she was the Florida state secretary of state. Notably, the California state secretary of state, Bill Jones, who charged that the vote-pairing web sites were illegal, was also a Republican supporter of George W. Bush. The federal [[United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit|Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals]] would eventually rule against him, but this decision did not come down until February 6, 2003, long after the 2000 election was already over. In the next presidential election, in 2004, the legality of the vote-pairing web sites went unquestioned. Indeed, the California state secretary of state for the 2004 election (a successor to Bill Jones) publicly announced, before that election, that vote pairing was legal.

{| class="wikitable" 
|-
! Organization
! Shut down after Jones threat
! Signups
! Swaps (2 voters each)
! Swaps in Florida to Gore
|-
! nadergore.com
| Shut down
| 221
| 98 (est)
| 15
|-
! nadergore.org
| 
| 300
| 150
| 13 (est)
|-
! nadertrader.org
| 
| 0
| 0
| 0
|-
! tradevotes.com
| 
| 310
| 147
| 13 (est)
|-
! voteexchange.com
| 
| 9698
| 3127
| 277 (est)
|-
! voteexchange.org
| 
| 692
| 346
| 17
|-
! voteswap2000.com
| Shut down
| 5000
| 2500
| 265
|-
! voteswap2000.net
| 
| 6325
| 3102
| 322
|-
! votetrader.org
| 
| 228
| 98
| 10
|-
! votexchange2000.com
| Shut down
| 3000
| 1331 (est)
| 118 (est)
|-
! winwincampaign.org
| 
| 10251
| 5125
| 362
|-
! Total (including estimates)
! 
! 36025
! 16024
! 1412
|}