Not illegal, but unethical.

You will also notice that all these sites are geared towards beating out the tories.

You have no idea if the other person will really vote the way you wanted them to, and because it is unethical - those are the type of people you are going to get playing the game.

I'm willing to trade my vote for a lovely lemon pie.

oooh...a pieocracy.  I can get behind that.

Not sure what's unethical about it - the system is broken, and this is one way of getting trying to get around its flaws.  There is nothing about strategic voting that indicates strategic voters to be any less honest than anyone else.

Having said that, SnP's basic point is correct:  This isn't really a trade, since you have no reason to believe that the other person really will vote for the person they're supposed to, per the arrangement.  And it depends on them voting for the person they didn't want to vote for - quite a gamble.

The only way to truly trade votes is to trade geographic locations with someone, and vote in your new respective ridings.  If you really want to go to that much trouble, then by all means go for it.  But somehow it doesn't seem worth it, does it?

If I was a canny political strategist, I'm sure that there is some way I could capitalize on this to benefit my candidate(s) esp. given that, as pointed out above, there's no way for a person to know for sure that the person they "traded" with really voted the way they said they would. If you want to vote strategically, then hold your nose and vote for the candidate with the best chance to beat whomever you're trying to get rid of/keep out and don't mess around with this vote trading thing. Personally, I'm inclined not to waste time figuring that out. I know which platforms and candidates I like and I'll vote for one of them.

Mendalla