Buy My Ballot, Please

NYT Op-Ed Contributor



Maplewood, N.J.

IT is easy to understand the emerging consensus favoring a national standard for paper receipts from voting machines. You don’t have to see a grassy knoll at every polling place to harbor suspicions about ballot technology and to demand receipts verifying that the machine properly recorded your vote. The United States Senate has just scheduled hearings to explore recent revelations that even state-of-the-art voting machines can be easily hacked.

But the proposals that were recently introduced in Congress are intended only for audits by officials. Once voters see that the receipt accurately reflects their choice, they are supposed to leave it with officials.

And that doesn’t work for me. I want to sell my vote.

My lawyer says this is illegal. But that can be finagled — about which more in a moment.

Beyond the question of law, some might complain that an open ballot would corrode the ethical underpinnings of the franchise. Not so. Indeed, conservatives should support this free and open marketplace of electoral ideas. Liberals should champion its prospects for redistributing wealth.

What’s more, it’s as American as smuggling rum. Before dewy-eyed reformers drew curtains across our voting booths during the late 19th century, open balloting was common practice. (True, the Constitution of 1795 called for secret ballots during the French Revolution, but we all know how that turned out.)

In the states during the 1800s, party hacks frequently liquored up the party members in their wards and marched them to the polls (constituents doggedly following the footsteps of the ward heelers). There, the vote in question was cast for all to see. Or hear. Following a fairly widespread English tradition, many citizens would announce their votes for the record. Hiding your preference was, to some, dishonorable.

But then the Chartists in Britain — offended by landlords and employers telling tenants and workers how to vote — started advocating casting votes in private. At the same time, in Australia, a huge influx of immigrants led to the first widely used preprinted candidate rosters, which allowed voters to express their preferences in secret. Goaded on by the newly ascendant Populists, America soon adopted this “Australian ballot.” That resulted in the relatively secure voting booth that we accept today as standard.

But this has spawned a central inequity. The current system has restricted the monetization of votes to our legislatures (or, in the case of Brooklyn, to our judiciary). And here’s the imbalance: campaign promises are frequently counterfeit. Officeholders sell to donors, but they don’t buy from voters.

Once again, good government types have simply proven the law of unintended consequences. On the floor of the campaign finance exchange, transparency is the market’s invisible hand — officeholders know who gave them how much, and donors know who voted which way.

Which is not fair to voters. We deserve a similarly frictionless market. Show me the money, and I’ll show you my vote.

Alternatively, of course, we could devalue the currency on the campaign finance side. A handful of states employ blind trusts so that candidates in judicial elections don’t know who has donated to their campaigns precisely to disconnect the quid from the quo. New York — now wrangling over how to air out the smoke-filled rooms where its vestigial Tammany bosses hold the last judge-picking monopoly in America — might well consider such a donation laundry, too. Judges should not be perceived as financially beholden to supplicants before their bench.

Professors Ian Ayres of Yale and Jeremy Bulow of Stanford have proposed the creation of just such a “donor booth” for the election of other officeholders. But that would clearly work too well to ever gain passage. Why donate if you can’t be assured the elected official will be aware of your donation — and guarantee a return on your investment?

As with all things electoral these days, the whole fracas brings us back to Florida. But I don’t mean hanging chads. Last year, the authorities there were threatening Ann Coulter, the conservative columnist, with prosecution for knowingly voting in the wrong district. This is wrong-headed. Why such geographical autocracy? I want different precincts to bid for my vote.

Now, as for that small problem of constitutional or statutory prohibitions on vote selling: Not to worry. When I cast the ballot I’ve sold to the highest bidder, I will immunize myself from prosecution with a declaration providing post facto legality, based on my hypothetical intent to relocate. Call it a residential signing statement.

In fact, I want to expand my market beyond state lines. I live in New Jersey, but the national vote market here seems to have become less valuable during the past few years. So I want an E-vote brokerage: Next election, I’m guessing battleground states will be very eager to pay for my hand on the lever.

Ohio? Florida? What am I bid?

Dirk Olin is editor in chief of the Web site Judicial Reports and director of the Institute for Judicial Studies.