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People have already bet hundreds of millions of dollars on election results this year on prediction markets. Ahead of the midterms, Wisconsin officials are pushing back to keep elections from becoming moneymaking opportunities. NPR's Bobby Allyn reports.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Ann Jacobs is a commissioner with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, a usually pretty quiet agency that oversees state elections. Recently, though, her day was anything but quiet.
ANN JACOBS: I was sitting at my desk, and all of a sudden, Twitter showed a lot of alerts.
ALLYN: The alerts were from employees and lawyers at the prediction market company Kalshi.
JACOBS: My reaction was, boy howdy, are they mad.
ALLYN: Jacobs was pretty taken aback. And that's because what set off the attacks was a commission advisory telling voters that they cannot place a bet in an election in which they cast a ballot. Jacobs says the advisory wasn't announcing new policy. It was simply stating the basics of the Wisconsin election law.
JACOBS: You can't be a felon on active supervision and vote. If you're 17, you can't vote.
ALLYN: And you can't put down money on a race where you vote, according to a law that was originally passed in 1849. Jump ahead to 2026, and Kalshi is making legal threats over the law, saying it's bananas and illegal and a type of voter suppression. Jacobs said she wasn't trying to spark a big online debate about election betting but that voters could be prosecuted if found to have wagered on a race.
JACOBS: We want people voting for the person they think will do the best job at the position they are being elected to. We don't want people voting for someone who isn't the best person for the job simply because it's going to line a voter's pocket.
ALLYN: Billions of dollars are traded every week on prediction market sites Kalshi and Polymarket. Big sporting events like the NBA Finals and the World Cup saw tens of billions wagered, and the companies expect the midterm elections to be another massive event. But that comes up against another reality. Election betting is illegal in some or all circumstances in 32 states. That's according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
MATT BARRETO: There should be absolutely no money involved in the outcome of our democracy. We should be voting on candidates for their positions and their policies to represent us, not because we can make a buck.
ALLYN: That's Matt Barreto. He's the director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. He says there are all sorts of potential issues with election betting. Foreign actors or partisans could use prediction markets to make a candidate appear more popular than they are in an effort to influence turnout. Then there's the potential for insider trading, an issue that has dogged the prediction market industry, where everyone from President Trump's teleprompter operator to a special forces soldier have been accused of trading on confidential information.
Barreto says, imagine how this could potentially play out during the midterms. Say a poll worker places a bet on one candidate, and in order to make money, they slow down the vote count or do an intentional undercount to change the real election result.
BARRETO: If we found people who were somehow connected to either political campaigns or to the administration of elections, and the secretary of state's office or a county elections office were somehow involved in this, in the same way that Pete Rose tarnished the sanctity of baseball...
ALLYN: Kalshi declined to comment, but the company has argued that election betting will engage people who might not have cared otherwise about politics. This is why they argue states like Wisconsin trying to prevent election betting are engaged in voter suppression. Barreto doesn't buy it.
BARRETO: If they sincerely cared about voter suppression, they would use some of their profits to set up a charity to mobilize the vote.
ALLYN: Kalshi isn't backing turn-out-the-vote efforts. But the company recently launched a midterm election dashboard to allow traders to monitor and place money on dozens of races at once.
Bobby Allyn, NPR News.
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