A Market For Votes

If you were to designate one symbol for democracy, it would be voting. If you had to designate one symbol for the integrity of politics, it would be voting. If you had to designate one symbol for legislative vision outside the market, it would be voting. So just how bad, and for what exact reasons, would it be if we allowed people to sell their votes as a commodity?

The debate on whether or not to marketize certain goods usually develops a pretty visceral reaction from people. A few years back Nestle almost managed to monopolize bottled water and I remember everybody having the collective fear that something so fundamental could be taken away and put up to the whims of the market. On the other hand, there’s recently been a large push to legalize certain drugs, with good evidence showing that it would make them much safer in a few different areas. You may have heard other examples like selling kidneys or legalizing sex work, too.

The reality is that for a large majority of the things we interact with daily, the market is a perfect place for them to be. It’s able to induce competition, allocate raw materials correctly, find efficient prices, and the best part is that no central planning is necessary. If we distributed everything like we distribute votes, that would make no sense–if we gave everybody one bicycle every four years then most would just lay in garages unused, while serious bikers would get very frustrated. On top of that all these bikes would most likely be low quality due to the sheer amount demanded, even if people were willing to pay much more for them. So, if we can push back the moral aspect till the second half of the post, what exactly would a market of votes look like economically?

The Setup

The first thing to cover is that we’d still give everybody one vote to begin with. The alternative would be something lottery style, where people would buy any amount of votes they want from the government–and while this actually seems appetizing on the surface if ideally all the government gained wealth would be given back through welfare programs, it lends itself even more so to corruption by the rich and isn’t really much of a market anyways. So we’ll stick to the other version where each person still gets one vote, and let’s say that it happens through a universal app that gives one price to all users. It’d follow supply and demand, looking pretty similar to the price of a stock share.

The 2020 presidential election saw the highest voter turnout of the 21st century, yet only totaled to sixty-six percent of the population. This means that under a normal election, just under half the population would be willing to sell their vote for next to nothing, if they didn’t hold a grudge in doing so and they were acting rationally. And that’s without a big price. To the other half of the population, it usually means quite a lot to vote–unlike many common goods, there are no diminishing returns for votes, and in fact a buyer would most likely want to obtain a few if they were looking to buy. This is heightened by the fact that most voters are pretty passionate about voting; even most broke college students I know would forgo a meal in order to help a political cause. Future expectation would also play a large part–especially if people were able to resell votes, with the stock philosophy of buy low sell high–but also in terms of how close people consider the election to be going. Votes from the highly contentious 2020 election would probably sell for much higher than, say, Lincoln's obvious re-election, or perhaps if one party was starting to tip the majority, the other side would step it up and in turn raise the market price. And even past just price, my expectation is that the utility value of a vote would go up too–as in, the average person buying a vote would do much more research, have had a long standing interest in politics, and hopefully have a stronger drive with respect to the wellbeing of others.

Now, in truth there are thousands of different angles to consider, and a billion different ways it could go. Most of this blog will focus on socio-political analysis, but I do highly recommend the study “Competitive Equilibrium in Markets for Votes” By Casella, Llorente-Saguer, and Palfrey. It delves deeply into what this market would really look like, and introduces different ways of approaching the numbers.

Overall I was able to ask about 20 friends how much money they would sell or buy a vote for, and even though this is a pretty small sample size it definitely illuminated some trends. One of the things that came up most often was that the amount they would sell their vote for was astronomically higher than how much they would buy another’s for, with a few saying that they wouldn’t buy one at all. This makes a lot of sense just anecdotally speaking–the intuited value of contributing to an election is high, while trying to quantify it out seems low. And while it was really interesting getting to hear the reasoning for everybody’s unique answers, a solid average would lay at around 300$ to sell their vote and 50$ to buy someone else’s.

The Good, The Bad, And The Wealthy

Now we can approach the aspects of what would actually happen in the aftermath. The first big problem to consider is that all votes might go directly to the rich, and this definitely does have some concerning plausibility to it. The worst part isn’t that this will sway political percentages, only around 57% of the rich lean republican–it’s just how incredibly wealthy the rich are. I was dumbfounded to find that hypothetically if the market price for a vote was one thousand dollars, and half of America’s 300 million population sold their vote, Bezos would be able to fully elect himself president solely through his net worth. As you can see this would incur a wildly terrible reality, and we’ll return to it near the end of the essay.

But what about the positive side? The whole purpose of this concept really was to incur a consumer benefit, a net surplus where people who didn’t feel the need to vote could make a mutually beneficial transaction to those who did. And economically speaking, it fully would. If we ignore the problematic aspect of the rich buying up all the votes, our previous example would build a net surplus of (10)$ * 150 million people, added to the net benefit of all the buyer’s satisfaction–that’s massive! Even though no new raw material or innovation is added, we also won’t have the situation of just printing more money and the subsequent inflation. Instead it might be likened to something like trading halloween candy as a kid–the people who need money will receive it, while the people who think they can provide value as a double voter will get their chance. It’s a spectacular reallocation of ideological resources.

Though at this point, many readers may be getting the feeling that something’s wrong. Isn’t it the point of voting that everybody gets an equal say? Even if in reality a large portion of the population don’t end up voting, an economist might consider it a ‘public good’ that as many people as possible end up doing so. Capitalistic societies also have the tendency to place a high value on things that can’t be paid for. Things like olympic medals, or a happy long term relationship, are placed on a level of higher intrinsic value than a Lamborghini, or hot tub, just based solely on the idea that they can’t be bought–and thank God that we think this way. In Utilitarianism, which is a branch of moral philosophy concerned with maximizing total happiness, writers often create the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ pleasures. In our example a philosopher like Mill would consider true democracy a very lofty good while the marginal utility we’d get from marketizing it would create a much lower advantage. On the other hand, it’s always important as economists to calculate even this type of difference–another philosopher named Jeremy Bentham once famously asked the question “How many games of bowling are worth a good friend?” (Funnily enough, it was a brand new game at the time). It definitely seems to be a puzzle of a question, but makes the reader wonder if it would ever be possible to pin down the utility value of something like ‘faith in democracy’. Bentham was actually the inventor of the word ’maximize’, and it’s quite interesting to notice how the word “utility” comes up in both ideologies–one in capital and the other in happiness. The approach of maximization usually goes unquestioned with economics, but it’s always interesting to see its boundaries with unquantifiable things like democracy, or rights.

The question of rights is a big one, especially since that’s the way voting is packaged to us in the constitution. Now, this is a tricky one to approach because the ‘right’ to anything is more of a moral conclusion than an actual claim. It seems that America’s doctrine is mostly based upon the somewhat Christian idea of a soul that has value in itself, and therefore the source of all individual rights stems from this value. From this, many philosophers have tried to figure out the ‘fundamental right’ that sort of splits into all the others. Hobbes thought it was self defense, Locke thought it was property, but one that I’ve heard a lot of recently is that the U.S. secures a right to Dignity above all else. This starts to make sense when you see how it plays out in our laws–just like nobody is forced to vote, nobody is forced to own a gun or be religious either. It’s much more about protecting the sanctity of an individual’s freedoms, and importantly the relevancy those freedoms hold. So yes, in our scenario you would have the right to vote–but would you have the right to do so meaningfully? And would the Dignity of either buyer or seller remain intact? It really doesn’t take much to realize that we could very well take away the meaning of a right to vote if others were able to buy that right away from us.

For Better Futures

Now, there’s one final, and massively important, caveat to all of this that should be brought up. The most obvious thing to bring up were the mega billionaires who would use this system of voting to their advantage. And not just billionaires, but even simply upper to lower income bracket interactions–we saw that people in poverty would most likely be pressured to sell their vote out of necessity, meanwhile middle class citizens may be more inclined to think that their vote mattered (Anecdotally, but still).

But what if this all played out without extreme income inequality? I urge you to really pause and picture it in your mind, as a lot of the dynamics would shift in a pretty fundamental way. When we brought up the fact of olympic medals, or the possibility to infringe on the intrinsic value of a soul, it’s really the element of power and coercion that makes these things seem as severe as they are. If we were all on a relatively similar bracket of income, the transfer of a vote would seemingly be from a difference of aptitude and preference, rather than one of dominance and imbalance. It even seems to apply with the other areas we brought up in the introduction–sex work too, or selling a kidney could drop the fear of coercion if we had a broader degree of equality.

There are many sociopolitical factors that shape the way we see markets. A quick analysis we looked at showed that there is the possibility of almost three billion dollars worth of consumer net surplus if we left votes up to the market–but this isn’t really about that. We also saw that people value their own vote much more than someone else’s, so perhaps it is less about winning elections and more about keeping democratic identity intact. To ask if there should be a market for votes is really an impossible question, and regardless we all know that in reality it would be a disaster. An exploration of it though can serve as a beautiful microcosm into how and why we let the market determine some areas of our life, and not others. And the next time election season rolls around, just know that your vote is worth a lot more than it may seem.

Works Cited

Casella, Alessandra, et al. "Competitive Equilibrium in Markets for Votes." University of Chicago Press Journals, www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/667988.

A Market for Votes? Performance by Micheal Sandel and Joe Stiglitz, New Economic Thinking, 2019. Youtube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDo-FJLmtEo&t=855s&ab_channel=NewEconomicThinking. Accessed 1 July 2023.

Okun, Arthur M., and Lawrence Summers. Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff. Washington, Brookings Institution Press, 2015.

Record High Turnout in 2020 General Election. United States Census Bureau, 8 Oct. 2021, www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/record-high-turnout-in-2020-general-election.html#:~:text=Voting%20rates%20were%20higher%20in,compared%20to%2065%25%20in%202016. Accessed 1 July 2023.

Sides, John. "The Politics of the Top 1 Percent." FiveThirtyEight, 14 Dec. 2011, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-politics-of-the-top-1-percent/. Accessed 1 July 2023.