Every democracy eventually faces the same question: what do you do when someone tries to buy it?
The crude version is straightforward. Cash for votes. Brown envelopes in parking lots. This still happens—and still works—more often than comfortable citizens like to admit. But focusing on bribery misses the larger picture. Money corrupts collective decision-making through mechanisms far more sophisticated than stuffing bills into pockets.
Why People Sell
Before discussing defenses, we need honesty about offense.
Vote-selling persists because it solves real problems for real people. A hundred dollars means nothing to someone with savings. It means everything to someone choosing between rent and groceries. When we criminalize vote-selling, we're often prosecuting poverty—punishing the desperate while the wealthy buyer walks away with what they purchased.
This isn't a defense of the practice. Sold votes produce harmful outcomes regardless of why they were sold. But designing countermeasures requires understanding incentives, and the incentive to sell is frequently desperation, not greed.
The productive intervention isn't moral condemnation of sellers. It's building systems where buying doesn't work, and addressing the conditions that make selling attractive.
The Buyer's Problem
Vote-buying has a structural weakness: enforcement.
If I pay you to vote a certain way, how do I verify you did? Secret ballots exist precisely to break this transaction. You can take my money and vote however you want. I can't watch you fill in the form.
This is why crude vote-buying tends to concentrate in contexts where verification is possible: small committees with open votes, blockchain governance with public ledgers, or situations where ongoing relationships allow for punishment of defection.
Modern secret ballot systems made direct vote-buying largely impractical for mass elections. The lesson isn't that democracy solved the money problem—it's that specific design choices can make specific attacks unprofitable. Different designs reopen different vulnerabilities.
Beyond Bribery: Structural Plutocracy
Direct vote-buying is amateur hour. The sophisticated approach doesn't purchase individual votes—it purchases the conditions under which votes happen.
Information control - Why buy votes when you can buy the information voters use to decide? Media ownership, advertising saturation, and platform manipulation shape choices before anyone enters a voting booth. The vote remains "free" while the decision has already been manufactured.
Agenda control - Why buy votes on a decision when you can determine which decisions get voted on? Access to politicians, funding for campaigns, and influence over party platforms means the options presented have already been filtered through wealth.
System design - Why buy votes within a system when you can buy the system's design? Lobbying for rules that advantage your position, funding legal challenges to unfavourable structures, and shaping the architecture of decision-making itself.
These mechanisms are legal, normalized, and far more effective than bribery. They don't corrupt democracy at the moment of the vote—they corrupt everything upstream of that moment.
Token Voting and Whale Dominance
Cryptocurrency governance offered a natural experiment in what happens when you build voting systems without these lessons.
Many early blockchain projects adopted simple token-weighted voting: one token, one vote. This seemed elegant. Stakeholders with more investment get more say. Skin in the game.
The result was predictable to anyone who'd studied democratic history and surprising to technologists who hadn't. Wealth concentrated. Small holders became irrelevant. "Whales"—large token holders—dominated every decision. Governance became oligarchy with extra steps.
Some projects tried delegation: let small holders pool their votes behind representatives. This recreated representative democracy's problems—captured delegates, voter apathy, principal-agent failures—without its evolved safeguards.
The lesson wasn't that token voting is inherently broken. It's that naive implementations reproduce plutocracy, and building equitable systems requires intentional design against wealth concentration.
Quadratic Voting: A Partial Answer
One response to plutocratic drift is changing the cost curve.
In simple voting, buying twice the influence costs twice as much. Linear scaling. Whales win.
Quadratic voting changes the math: your first vote costs one credit, your second costs four, your third costs nine. Influence becomes expensive fast. Someone with a hundred times your resources doesn't get a hundred times your voice—they get ten times, at most.
This doesn't eliminate wealth advantages. It compresses them. A millionaire still outweighs a minimum-wage worker, but not by the ratio their bank accounts would suggest.
The problem? Quadratic voting assumes each participant has one identity. It fails catastrophically against Sybil attacks. If I can create ten fake accounts, I can split my resources across them and defeat the quadratic cost curve entirely. The identity problem from our previous article comes roaring back.
Every defense creates new vulnerabilities. Security is a stack, not a solution.
Conviction Voting: Time As Commitment
Another approach taxes impatience rather than wealth.
Conviction voting lets participants stake votes on proposals over time. The longer your votes stay committed, the more weight they accumulate. This favors participants with genuine long-term investment in outcomes over drive-by voters chasing short-term gains.
It also creates new attack surfaces—the "patience attack" where wealthy actors simply wait out genuine participants, or lock-in dynamics where changing your position becomes prohibitively expensive. We'll explore these in a dedicated article.
The point isn't that conviction voting solves money's influence. Nothing solves it entirely. The point is understanding which tradeoffs different mechanisms make.
What Actually Helps
Defending collective decisions against wealth corruption requires layered approaches:
Secret ballots where possible - Break the verification that makes vote-buying enforceable.
Identity systems that resist Sybils - Prevent wealth from multiplying through fake accounts.
Cost curves that compress wealth advantages - Quadratic mechanisms, participation caps, diminishing returns on spending.
Transparency about influence - When money flows into decision-making, make it visible. Sunlight isn't sufficient, but darkness enables worse.
Diversified decision mechanisms - Don't let every choice run through the same system. Vary the rules so that gaming one mechanism doesn't capture everything.
Upstream intervention - Address the desperation that makes vote-selling attractive. Reduce inequality. Build safety nets. This is slower and harder than clever mechanism design, but it addresses root causes rather than symptoms.
The Honest Conclusion
Money will always influence collective decisions. The question isn't whether to eliminate that influence—we can't—but how to structure systems so wealth doesn't simply dictate outcomes.
This requires technical mechanisms, legal frameworks, social norms, and underlying economic conditions that reduce desperation. No single intervention suffices. Defense is comprehensive or it fails.