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Can someone tell me why this wouldn't work:
1. It is true, but little-known, that in Wisconsin it is explicitly illegal to vote in an election where you have a bet riding on the outcome
2. Kalshi is legal in the US
3. Suppose you want your candidate to win. You spend a bunch of money advertising Kalshi to people in Wisconsin who support the other candidate, and get them to bet on the election
4. Invalidate all of their votes
(4) is infeasible, because voting systems are designed so that nobody can identify which voter cast which vote - including that voter. This property is called "coercion resistance", which should immediately suggest why it is important!
I further object that any scheme to "win" an election by invalidating votes (or preventing them, etc) is straightforwardly unethical and a betrayal of the principles of democracy. Don't give the impression that this is acceptable behavior, or even funny to joke about.
Agreed that stealing elections is bad and shouldn't be done.
That said, I don't actually see anything that would make a large-scale vote invalidation setup like this illegal—as mentioned in the statute linked, you can directly challenge someone's right to vote in the polling booth. In fact, if you don't want to fall afoul of targeted voter disenfranchisement laws, you can simply challenge voters uniformly across the state, provided that your previous targeted advertising made it more likely for people of a certain political leaning to have been more likely to render themselves ineligible.
Seems bad that this is possible. Technically, if I'm reading the 14th amendment correctly, it looks like Wisconsin's representation should be decreased in proportion to how many people bet on the election...
decreased in proportion to how many people bet on the election
No, how many male citizens twenty-one years of age do. Neither the 19th nor the 26th seem to override this.