The Art of Voting

Digital and online technologies are not only used by insurgent social movements to disseminate information in innovative ways but are also generative of distinctive forms in which activist groups may be organised. Social networking sites introduced widespread and effective strategic voting in the United States of America's Presidential election of 2000. The aim of these sites was to enable voters in different states to swap votes. In 2007 a federal appeals court decided that at least one form of these vote-swapping sites were constitutionally protected. Online vote swapping has since been advocated or has occurred in other countries around the world, including Canada and the United Kingdom. Even more controversially, 'Voteauction' by Ubermorgen.com was a website asserting it enabled individuals to buy and sell their votes in the 2000 Presidential election in the United States of America. Ubermorgen.com declared the work legal art after it was shut down before voting took place. These political actions brought into question the politics of electoral boundaries. 'Voteauction' invited those who encountered it to focus on how legal systems structure the democratic mandates of nation-states and reflect on the implications of real-time technologies for the way in which the law regulates society.