Opportunities for one-liners abound here. Under the Illinois statute, the issue is whether there is any “valuable consideration.” As a 1923 Ohio case puts it, “it has value if some person or persons desire it.” *Scott v. State *, 197 Ohio St. 475, 487 (1923) (improper sexual relations with the offeree sufficient value for bribery conviction). This raises some factual questions about you and your relationship with your girlfriend that I’ll leave you to answer.
Under the federal statute the issue is whether somebody made or offered to make an expenditure or solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure. I’ll leave the analysis of this question to you as well.
What about the opposite, selling a non-vote. You’ve probably all heard the joke about someone who made a deal with someone opposing his candidate, saying that since their votes would cancel each other’s out they’d both stay home. The punch line of course is that he’d made the same deal with multiple people.
Would an inducement to prevent someone voting be legal? The statutes previously cited make no mention of this. What if I went to a Clinton rally and offered people money to stay home on election day? I’m sure the government has an interest in stopping this, but I’m curious as to the means they would use.
There is an implied promise in doing so, even if not specifically stated. Again, there’s enormous amounts of history behind this. If an oft-cited example, “George Washington, running for the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1757, is said to have handed out an average of a quart-and-a-half of rum, wine, beer or hard cider for each voter.” Offering free liquor to voters would be common for at least another century. Political machines got the votes of the poor, immigrants, and blacks by distributing food, coal, and other necessities with the understanding that they would vote for the machine’s candidates on election day.
Just like vote buying, there’s no way to police implied promises on an individual scale, but these systemic handouts were made illegal for all considerations. That would include Twinkies.
I’m not sure about today, but as little as twenty years ago, people used the “blank ballot” scheme. The perpetrator went in to vote and never deposited his ballot. He took it outside and marked the candidates that he wished to vote for.
When a person was paid, he went into the precient, got his own blank ballot, deposited the schemer’s ballot, and gave back his blank one, which the schemer marked again, rinse and repeat. So, if you gave back a blank ballot, you almost certainly deposited the marked one…
