Comment Text:
I strongly oppose your proposal to classify election futures markets as "gaming" and to ban U.S. citizens from participating in them.
First, I do not think the federal government of the U.S. is well-advised to spend its energy finding yet more peaceful activities of U.S. citizens to ban. I would much rather see the federal government of the U.S. spending its limited resources and attention span on *increasing* the freedom of U.S. citizens rather than *decreasing* it. I deplore the desire of regulators in the U.S. federal governments to reduce adult U.S. citizens to the status of children or incompetent wards.
Second, I consider election futures markets an important form of public information. They give what is probably the least politically biased test for real public opinion and real voting patterns in the U.S. Importantly, in cases where an election is poorly handled and there are questions about the accuracy of its official vote count, elections futures markets can provide a valuable test of whether the official results of a federal or state election are credible. Since the integrity of U.S. elections has been called into question, the public badly needs such an impartial and uncensorable reality check, and will continue to do so at least until we succeed in restoring our elections to a higher level of credibility.
