Yes, it is serious. However, it is genuinely not about trying to "maximize turnout" or get any specific person or party into power. Rather, Vote By Pal is an earnest attempt at connecting people who can exercise their right to vote but aren't personally interested in that, with people who can't. Vote By Pal provides a way of turning something that might feel pointless and even depressing (voting) into something infused with meaning and significance, by virtue of its value to someone else. Vote By Pal is invested in building solidarity and connection between people who have differing access to voting rights, rather than being invested in the electoral process itself. Vote By Pal maintains that representative democracy is a questionable system.

This project targets two kinds of people: Those who can vote but for whatever reason don't want to, and those who can't vote at all. Only around half of eligible Americans vote in our national elections. Voter participation hit a high mark in 2020, at around 67 percent. But even that number means one third of people who can vote in this country opted not to. That silence, or abstention, speaks volumes-- even if its message is unclear or disparate. Way back in 2020, most people who didn't want to vote seemed to fall into one of these categories: they think their vote doesn't matter, they disapprove of the parties or the candidates, they think the whole system is so irredeemable that the most moral thing is to abstain, or they simply do not care enough to go through the rigamarole. Now, in 2024, it remains understandable that many people might feel any of these ways. At the same time, there are many reasons people can't vote, and any of them are valid reasons to participate in this project: a criminal record that disenfranchises you, immigration status, age, lack of ID in a state with voter ID laws, &c. Having a voting pal who doesn't have the same access to the ballot box can give people who would otherwise not want to vote a sense of accountability to someone who will also be impacted by the decisions of elected officials, but doesn't have the opportunity to vote for them. If you're on the fence about voting, or just kind of apathetic about it (like, "I know I should, but I don't know if I'll get around to it") you can think of signing up as a way to feel accountable to follow through on voting, and to vote in a way that even if it doesn't feel personally meaningful to you, would feel tremendously meaningful to someone else.

YES! It is! You can stop asking! Legal counsel has signed off on this (and that's not true of every project). Animated eagles aside, Vote By Pal is essentially people connecting with a new person and communicating about who they would vote for. It happens far away from the voting booth and polling centers (because it's largely digital and well in advance of election day). Eventually one of those people, who has the right to vote, may vote in a way that reflects the opinions of their pal. But they aren't actually obligated to vote at all, or even in a way that is in line with their pal's opinions. And they aren't obligated to report back to their pal on what they did. There's nothing of value being exchanged for votes, no coercion, no guaranteed expectation or even verification (such as a requirement to take a photo) that the voter did what the non-voter suggested. It's like if you asked your under-18 kid who they think you should vote for. You might take their advice, you might not. But there's no legal issue with having that conversation. In the same way that this project is more about complicated webs of solidarity and empathy than electoral politics, I think the widespread fear of somehow inciting the ire of baseless election-fraud trolls says more about what we let obstruct our most ambitious utopian ideals than the actual election fraud trolls themselves.

No. There's a subversive provocation here, for sure. But it's leveled just as much at the people in charge (or the system) as at a person who feels that the most righteous thing they can do re: voting is to abstain.

I know for a fact that when I put out my single-stream recycling every week, it just goes to a landfill. But I still recycle religiously. Maybe that's stupid, but the alternative feels so nihilistic that I can't bear it. Meanwhile, I still do my best to reduce what even goes into the recycling bin, since that is obviously more effective at reducing waste. The point of that imperfect metaphor is that I think at this point, why not just try a thing? Especially a thing that's kind of funny and that connects two human beings who would otherwise not know each other and that reminds them on some level that we are all connected and our actions affect one another (sorry). Subjecting every individual action to the vague "does it actually work" critique often serves to mostly just express our own individual hopelessness and justify continuing to do nothing. And I think if we keep doing that, rather than creating a dialectic/action-plan, we are pretty fucked. I mean, we may already be irreversibly fucked, but a lot of people felt that way during critical historical moments in the past and then managed to radically un-fuck themselves and their communities! Did they do that through the power of conceptual art projects? Who can say? Obviously, if this project has any effect on the elections, it will be negligible. That's not really the point. Much more than electoral politics, I'm interested in creating connections and conversations, and discovering ways that stalwartness and flexibility can meet each other. I'm interested in the complex places where efficacy is more nuanced than something that can be counted and tallied. I'm interested in creating the circumstances for people to do something they wouldn't otherwise do. Also, big fan of the butterfly effect.

Totally up to you! You might want to keep it to a brief text exchange where one person simply names the candidate they like. Or, you might want to get to know each other and have a more involved correspondence. The structure, like all human relationships, is fluid and depends on where you're both at.

Nope. The House and Senate make determinations that affect the whole country and even international policy.

That's not a question. Do what you want.

Me.