US Lawmakers Address CFTC, Requesting Ban on Financial Contracts Allowing Election Betting

A group of lawmakers, led by Oregon’s Senator Jeffrey Alan Merkley, approached the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on Monday, August 5, requesting a ban on financial contracts allowing betting on political events.

Besides Merkley, the official letter was signed by Senators Chris Van Hollen, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Sheldon Whitehouse. House Representatives Eleanor Holmes Norton, Jamie Raskin, and John Sarbanes have endorsed the renewed request too. All eight of them are Democratic party members.

The official letter was addressed to Rostin Benham, Chair of the commodities regulator. The legislators strongly affirmed their support for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, issued on May 10, 2024, aimed at upholding the integrity of US elections: “Finalizing and implementing this rule will prevent Wall Street from setting up massive political betting markets that could influence and interfere with election and further erode public trust in democracy.”

The legislators further highlighted that “elections are not a for-profit enterprise”, ultimately leading voters to wonder “if their vote mattered, and whether the outcome of the election was influenced by big money bets.”

Polymarket Sees Record High Volumes in Elections-Related Wagering

The official letter has not specified any particular wagering platform. That being said, the political move was preceded by announcements from different media sources detailing that Polymarket has seen a record high volume of active traders and betting volume.

More specifically, the platform has accumulated more than $500 million in wagers on the likely winner of the 2024 US presidential race. According to recent data, cited by CryptoSlate, Polymarket has had daily average visits reaching 296,515. In comparison, Uniswap, ranked second in terms of traffic, with daily average visits of 134,309.

The decentralized prediction market platform enables its customers to place bets on various world events by using digital currencies. Besides politics, the platform supports betting on other markets, including the Olympics, Crypto, POP Culture, Sports, Business, and Science.

The platform has seen a drastic escalation in website traffic especially following major events from the political scene of the previous month, including the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s decision to step out of the race for the White House.

The letter concluded that public trust in the electoral process would be further deteriorated if billionaires were allowed to place wagers on the Presidential Election Winner 2024 market “while simultaneously contributing to a specific candidate or party.” Likewise, the coalition of lawmakers pointed to the degrading practice of “political insiders to bet on elections using non-public information.” The lawmakers have urged the governmental agency to take immediate action and implement the rule “to prevent the commodification of U.S. elections.”