Buying Votes Experiment

Category: Politics

Published: 11/23/2009 03:23 p.m.

Here is the idea. Next time there is a big election, you simply offer people money not to vote. You go to the polls and say "How much would it take for you to not vote in this election?" Then you start handing out cash. This giant CNN Election Money Map shows that about $1 billion was raised during the last campaigns. This does not include money raised by candidates who lost in the primaries. The election results show that about 115 million people voted in the presidential election in 2008. If you split all of the money amongst the voters, that's about $9 a person.

What if you took half of the campaign money and offered it to voters in swing states. Florida, for example, had about 8 Million voters. Half of the Democrats fund raising is about $320 Million. That's $40 a Republican to sweep the state. It's much more to only buy out the votes needed to win. I can only speak for myself, but after waiting in line for a couple of hours to vote, I could really see some people taking the money and going home. With an effort targeted at specific districts, I believe someone could easily swing an election with as little as $12 Million. Florida and Ohio would have gone Red if 300,000 people per state didn't vote for President Obama. Offer $20 to people in long lines to just go home. Give out $6 million in a day per state and you've just "bought" that state.

Another interesting facet would be to ask people how much it would cost them to leave the line. My guess is these figures will be higher than what you could offer and have accepted. That is, the asking price might be $50 but you could probably get away with paying people $30, for example.

To make this even more interesting, you could poll them first and them offer them cash. This would almost certainly raise the asking price. People would just assume that you were only offering money because of their answer, and that alone would cause them to raise their price (or say no price at all) out of spite.

I'm curious if this would even be legal. Certainly you can't pay someone to vote for someone else, and really you would have no way to check. But paying your opponents not to vote could have the same effect in swinging a state without the repercussions.