Why then? Is it really that bad to exchange your vote for money or another gratification?

For much of American history, vote buying was a common practice, even if it was frowned upon. Until the last years of the 19th century, voting took place openly and voters could show up with completed ballots – usefully peddled by political parties or printed in partisan newspapers – to put them in the ballot box. In these circumstances, it was easy to find voters willing to exchange their vote for a drink or money.

With the advent of the secret ballot… Massachusetts led the way by requiring private voting booths and state-provided blank ballots, vote buying became much more difficult. Yet even though each state and federal government prohibits the practiceit persisted in some parts of the country.

In his masterful biography of Lyndon B. JohnsonHistorian Robert Caro describes how, in 1934, as an operative for a Texas congressional campaign, LBJ “sat in a San Antonio hotel room behind a table covered in five-dollar bills, handing them over to Mexican-American men at a price of five dollars.” one vote for every voice in their family. A story from Time magazine in 1960 described the “half-pint vote” as a common practice in southern West Virginia, where the “standard payment” for someone’s vote was “a half pint of bourbon whiskey and $2 to $5 in cash.” In 2012, the Ministry of Justice successfully sued two Arkansas men for a project to buy the votes of residents who had requested absentee ballots.

Are such cases of vote buying wrong? Most of us, I imagine, share the instinctive feeling that directly trading votes for money is sordid and scandalous. But it’s harder than you might think to explain why convincingly.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw looked into the matter when it was asked by his colleague, the philosopher Michael Sandel, during a session of the renowned course on justice.

“If you economists are so in favor of voluntary exchange,” Sandel challenged, “would you extend that conclusion to allowing one person to sell their right to vote to another person?”

No, Mankiw replied. Even if both parties to the voluntary exchange would be betterthe sale of votes must be prohibited due to “externalities”. This is economists’ language for the impact a transaction can have on unrelated third parties. When Alex agrees to vote for Bob in exchange for (say) $25, he also affects Clara’s future, who may be forced to endure policies Bob supports and opposes.

But wait. Suppose Alex agrees to vote for Bob not because he is paid to do so, but because Bob persuades him to do so during a conversation. Or seduces him with flattery. Or harass him by listening until he agrees. Or tricks him by lying about what his opponent will do if he wins. In all of these cases, no payment is involved but the outcome is the same: Alex votes for Bob, which could harm Clara’s future.

If all these ways of winning a vote are allowed, why not a simple payment?

Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, suggests other explanations. The gaudy benefits promised by candidates only truly become real when the public chooses to elect the candidate, while outright cash vote buying excludes the public from the process entirely. In this sense, vote buying disrupts the whole point of an election.

Conversely, once voters are paid to vote for a certain candidate, they have no future rights to that candidate. “If Candidate A considers that she has fulfilled her responsibility to Voter .

Some researchers propose a logic of fairness to prohibit direct vote buying: the poor are more likely to sell their votes, so elections will be biased in favor of the rich. Others argue that votes are not personal property; they belong to the body politic and cannot be used by individuals for their private enrichment.

These are all ingenious arguments, but do any of them actually explain why trading votes for money is so widely considered scandalous? My view is that vote buying is for most of us a desecration of something sacred. Whatever the debauchery of our politics, the act Voting always evokes a feeling of respect – the feeling that we are participating in the gravely eloquent ritual on which our system of self-governance rests.

Once voting became a secret act, it took on a sacred dimension. In the final hours of his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton spoke of the “great mystery of American democracy.” Perhaps it was to maintain this feeling of mystery that direct vote buying – which by the 1880s had become completely associated with corrupt political machines – has become so anathema.

Until recently, all this might have been of purely theoretical interest. But two modern developments have once again made it extremely easy to pay citizens for their guaranteed vote. One is the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and text messages; it’s a breeze to send proof of vote from inside the voting booth. The other is the post-pandemic acceptance of easy absentee voting by mail or public drop boxes. A voter simply fills out a ballot, then gives it to the campaign worker to be sealed in the envelope and dropped off in the mail.

At a time when so many other standards have been abandoned, is This does the standard continue to be protected? For more than a century, it helped imbue America’s often raucous system of self-government with a sacrosanct element. With all due respect to philosophers and economists, this is reason enough to preserve it.

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