When Jim Allen, the elections director for Delaware County, Pennsylvania, recently ran a training session for poll workers, he began a conversation about a topic he’d never previously had to address during training: prediction markets. “There was one person who stood up, and they said, ‘Well, what if we just want to make a minor bet on what turnout will be, that’ll keep things interesting?’ And we said: ‘No, this is all bad,’” Allen, who oversees 383 precincts, recounts.
As a result, Allen and the board of elections in Delaware County amended the oaths signed by people involved in elections to include “an affirmation that the workers have no direct or indirect interests in any bets, wagers, or prediction markets.”
Some 2,500 people, including everyone from full-time staff in the elections office to temporary employees helping process ballots on Election Day, have signed the oath ahead of November’s midterms.
“The rapid growth of prediction markets, and their plans to prey on elections, are direct threats to undermining trust in electoral outcomes,” Allen tells WIRED. “The overriding concern is that prediction markets have the potential to monetize a reward for manipulating results and, equally concerning, capitalizing on the anger and frustration by those who lose in these prediction markets.”
Increased Threats
With less than 100 days left until the midterms, and with President Donald Trump and members of his administration working overtime to undermine trust in American democracy, WIRED spoke to election officials across the country struggling to get their heads around how prediction markets could further complicate Election Day.
Last week’s Wisconsin gubernatorial primary showcased how large the discrepancy can be between prediction market odds and how a race actually shakes out, as both Kalshi and Polymarket had progressive candidate Francesca Hong as the likely winner until the results started coming in. (Traditional polling was also wildly off.) Election officials see risk in this type of scenario, where people place too much confidence in the probabilities shown by the markets and make wagers expecting guaranteed money. There’s also concern over whether prediction markets could fuel aggression against poll workers and other people involved in elections, something that some officials say they’ve already witnessed.
Prediction markets “fed a lot of the volatility in the aftermath of the June election,” says Dean Logan, county clerk for Los Angeles County, the country’s most populous election jurisdiction, during a webinar organized by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions. “I won’t go into great detail about how that resulted in threats or aggressiveness from observers or people who had a stake in the outcome of the election, but it is something that we definitely saw, and we saw it at a level that we haven’t seen in prior elections.”
“Let us be unambiguous: Threatening an election official or poll worker is a crime, and Kalshi condemns it in the strongest terms, full stop,” Kalshi spokesperson Jacki McGavick says.
Both Kalshi and Polymarket tell WIRED that they will not allow markets about whether there will be unrest at the polls.
One of the concerns election officials repeatedly raised was that voters appear to be confused about just what the odds in election markets represent. This was backed up by a recent survey conducted by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, which found that 75 percent of respondents were unable to correctly say what prediction market odds represented, with 35 percent of respondents claiming they were either counted votes or official projections from state officials.
“Prediction markets are a form of speculation, but they are increasingly being presented, and in some cases interpreted, as indicators of likely election outcomes,” Logan tells WIRED. “The challenge is that many people don’t distinguish between a market reflecting the views of participants and the official election process.”