#tacticalvoting

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.

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.

[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!