Your Vote Could Be Worth Cash

In the realm of politics, logrolling is the process of trading votes in order to obtain the passage of specific interests. While the formal buying and selling of votes is illegal, informal vote trading occurs often because it is hard to police. By revealing their preferences through an exchange, individuals can increase their chances of winning on the more important issues to them and potentially increased their realized gains. If vote trading is a voluntary exchange, then why could this be an issue?

This article in ABCNews discusses an internet site that sells blocks of votes to interest groups that hope to influence the election. The founder of the website, James Baumgartner, a graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, claims that corporations and individuals are already influencing voters with their money through external means and that his website, voteauction.net, is simply "a more direct method of doing that." The voteauction.net website offered US citizens the ability to sell their vote to the highest bidder in the 2000 presidential elections. Voters would fill out absentee ballots based on voteauction.net's recommendations, send them to Baumgartner to look over, and then Baumgartner sent the ballots to the polling places. In return, the voters would get cash.  After several US states issued temporary restraining orders for alleged illegal vote trading, the system was shut down. The article goes on to list several issues with the process - in addition to its illegality. For example, the votes are overpriced, much more than the market rates. The larger issue brought up is the increasing lack of interest that voters are showing in our political process. Bob Murch, an electoral historian, says that people "no longer see any value in their votes." The low voter turnout rates and selling of their votes on the internet reinforce this idea.