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Voteauction.com
GMontag writes: "Actually, this idea came up on the H2K mailing list a few months ago. A Wired story covers James Baumgartner's idea of the same thing. James is an MFA student at Albany, N.Y.'s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Basic idea, auction off write-in ballots to the highest bidding special interest group (not politician, read the article). The voters fill everything out themselves and they go through a service to check if the vote was cast "properly". Pretty nifty idea and keeps with the tradition of George Washington of Va., The Hon. Richard J. Daley of Chicago and Cas Walker of Knoxville, Tenn. Research of the last 2 men is an exercise left to the reader. If you were planning on skipping your vote this year, perhaps you can pocket a few bucks instead."
See this Salon story.
Make me an offer.
Politicians of all stripes make campaign promises, including tax cuts or entitlement increases to influence voters to vote for them, which could be construed as logically equivalent to buying votes, but I don't really think it is. Selling a vote would entail voting for a politician for direct personal gain, but voting in favor of a politician who promises a tax cut is a statement on public policy; I doubt many voters calculate out "If I vote for X, I will get 1/280,000th of a 10,000,000 tax cut over 7 years, whereas a vote for Y only gets me 1/280,000 of 5,000,000 over 3 years", and then votes for the politician who is offering to "pay" more.
I live in Washington, DC, and have watched Congress at work many times. I really believe that most Congressmen are honorable and doing their best at a staggeringly hard job.
I'm starting to wonder about some of the citizens, though.