An anecdote I share, recognizing the risk of downvoting: I've been an anarchist for years, and so do not normally cast votes.
I have offered to sell my vote to anyone in my area (a swing area of New Hampshire) who wants another vote for their side in any election at any level. I've never even set a price.
Not one person has ever offered a cent for it.
I mention this just by way of making the point that small-scale vote buying, which would be the hardest kind to detect, isn't happening.
Theoretically at least, detecting and preventing vote-buying at a scale significant enough to change the outcome of an election should be much easier.
Would-be buyers have to get word out to enough people for it to matter, but if most people assume this is unethical (or even just undesirable), it shouldn't be hard to get nearly everyone else to be willing to rat out the buyers.
I don't think the problem is nearly as hard to solve as you're thinking it is.
The odds of your vote swinging an election at any level are lower than the risk of being struck by lightning twice. Nobody wants to buy one vote. They need to buy hundreds or thousands before it will matter, and that makes them easier to catch.
Maybe I'm missing your point entirely, but that's one of the useful aspects of voter secrecy. Given that your vote is secret, your self-reported vote is worth approximately nothing. You could easily sell your vote to two or more parties, with none of them the wiser.
So your result is the expected one. But the outcome would not be the same with most types of harebrained "let's just vote with our phones" that people come up with regularly.
This is also why it is in most countries illegal to take photos or film around the voter booth.
Ah. Right. Relevant context: In 2016, a federal appeals court ruled that a 2014 New Hampshire law banning photo booth selfies and punishing them with fines up to $1,000 was unconstitutional.[0]
A photo of me with my completed ballot, in the voting booth, has always been part of the offer, since that was the same year I finally quit bothering to cast my own ballot.
I have offered to sell my vote to anyone in my area (a swing area of New Hampshire) who wants another vote for their side in any election at any level. I've never even set a price.
Not one person has ever offered a cent for it.
I mention this just by way of making the point that small-scale vote buying, which would be the hardest kind to detect, isn't happening.
Theoretically at least, detecting and preventing vote-buying at a scale significant enough to change the outcome of an election should be much easier.
Would-be buyers have to get word out to enough people for it to matter, but if most people assume this is unethical (or even just undesirable), it shouldn't be hard to get nearly everyone else to be willing to rat out the buyers.
I don't think the problem is nearly as hard to solve as you're thinking it is.
The odds of your vote swinging an election at any level are lower than the risk of being struck by lightning twice. Nobody wants to buy one vote. They need to buy hundreds or thousands before it will matter, and that makes them easier to catch.