4 ms·

Kalshi attacks a Wisconsin law banning election bets as 'voter suppression'

91 points by hn_acker 3mo ago

mwigdahl 3mo ago
And to note, the law in question is from the 1800s -- hardly something novel Wisconsin is doing.
- cwmoore 3mo ago
  Like building more jails? Could there be a better way?
lovich 3mo ago
Yet another article where the media is sanewashing the subject at hand > Then there's the potential for insider trading, something that has dogged the prediction market industry, … From a 2025 article [1] > Coplan said, “Nobody is under the impression that nobody knows the answer, right? Like, of course, there’s people who are working on it that know when it’s going to come. And I think what’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market and the market to change, and all of a sudden it’s trading at 95 cents.” I didn’t know you could be described as being dogged by an issue that you actively courted and espoused. Additionally I remembered that quote but it took effort to find as it appears Kalshi and Polymarket decided the heat on those views was a little too much and have done a PR wave since January of this year to claim that they totally don’t support insider trading despite that being a core of their business concept. I guess we’ve always been at war with East Asia again, I’ll update my firmware to be a good little drone if even media organizations like npr and apnews are just going to be this blatant with reframing history [1] https://casinobeats.com/2025/11/20/polymarket-founder-shayne-coplan-insider-trading-cool-sportsbooks-scam/ https://casinobeats.com/2025/11/20/polymarket-founder-shayne...
- mwigdahl 3mo ago
  There's big money in it, so of course there's going to be a huge PR push to cast it as a great moral and societal good. The thing that gets me is that the rationalists who were such outspoken proponents of prediction markets (look up "futarchy" and the many positive articles about it) failed to predict the astonishing amounts of corruption that have come along for the ride with them.
  - atmavatar 3mo ago
    Strictly speaking, we cannot say for sure they didn't predict the corruption -- merely that they didn't warn about it. For all we know, they're participating in the corruption, which is why they were outspoken proponents.
    - LargeWu 3mo ago
      Of course they're participating, even driving it. Notably there were large bets placed predicting imminent military actions in Iran and Venezuela. In at least one case it was verifiably placed by one of the individuals planning it. We've reached the point where our country's leaders can profit not by the outcome of the war, but even just by the very act of initiating it.
  - water-data-dude 3mo ago
    I was never rabid about it, but I thought prediction markets were a cool idea for a while. I didn't anticipate all of the crazy second order effects.
    - totallyhuman 3mo ago
      Same here. I soured on it a bit when I noticed them becoming a bit of a rhetorical stick, "well if you think you're right, go place a bet!". I guess that's good if you want people to only make claims they seriously believe in, but it had a tendency to shut down discussion, and I feel like there's something valuable in being able to discuss and debate without the expectation that being right should be rewarded with money, and being wrong should be punished with same. The negative second-order effects I expected were more about people concealing information and analysis that they otherwise would have shared, replacing complex but informative discussions with a black-box oracle. Boy was I wrong.
- rozab 3mo ago
  The experience we have of sports betting shows that even extraordinarily well compensated sportspeople will cheat to influence events due to greed. That's not such a big problem for something that fundamentally does not matter (sports outcomes). As you apply it to things that do matter, like political appointments, actions in warzones, and even weather measurements, people will and have changed these outcomes to make money.
- tzs 2mo ago
  What are you talking about? Kalshi and Polymarket having to do a wave of publicity to try to take off the heat over insider trading shows that the issue of insider trading is in fact dogging the industry. The NPR article's level of discussion of insider trading is entirely appropriate for an article that is not about insider trading.
  - lovich 2mo ago
    if an analogy would work for you, If my friend said they were planning on breaking and entering into homes to steal things for their income, and then complained that they were dogged by accusations of being a thief, I would call them out for being full of shit because they were getting called out for exactly what they planned on doing. If your argument is that NPR was correct in their description as being dogged by claims of insider trading, then I believe you and I have a difference of opinion on the connotations of the term "dogged" when it comes to describing accusations levied against you for behavior you 100% planned on engaging in.
- xtiansimon 2mo ago
  > “Yet another article where the media is sanewashing the subject at hand.” I agree this level of public gambling is crazy. Though I’m dismayed with the criticism of mainstream media not taking a stronger stance, which I take is your criticism. Isn’t that a page from the likes of Fox News? Bringing punditry into news? Moral outrage regarding what otherwise appears to be a legal business (online betting)? Even the link you provide used the word “hints” to describe insider trading: “Polymarket Founder Shayne Coplan Hints That Insider Trading is Cool & Sportsbooks are a Scam” I get that you’re angry, but I don’t understand why NPR is the villain.
  - lovich 2mo ago
    They didn’t need moral outrage. They needed to not report on this like insider trading was some problem these companies were having that they were trying to avoid or fix when the CEOs have publicly stated it was their goal.
    - xtiansimon 2mo ago
      > _"They needed to not..."_ I think I'm reading a moral stance in your comments. Like Commandments. "Thou shall not bear false witness". Maybe a radical stance in the context of news? I conclude you're demanding "mainstream media" (NPR) adopt a radical type of reporting and, yes, outrage by the use of your term "sanewashing". This is where you lose me. NPR is a news machine designed for neutrality. If there's a failure, I would say it's *Naivete*. A presumption of regularity and the rule of law will prevail. And if the reporter was also naive, then it's in the face of <evidence>. What's the purpose of taking one article and painting all news media as corrupt? I'm ready to grant that your conclusion [1] _"CEOs have publicly stated [insider trading] was their goal"_ is possible for some CEO. And unless you're an insider or receiving private information (which you've not claimed here), then your ground knowledge comes from reporting. The problem with reporting that's not making an effort at neutrality as NPR does, is relying on sources whose positions are blatantly one-sided or whose information is so complex [2] only a few can determine its veracity from one article to the next. Mainstream News about complex issues fundamentally lags real-time, because it comes from the people who report it and from the people willing to go on record, and some editorial process of evaluation. The moral crisis of mainstream media has always been ownership (gatekeeping), but NPR is "funded by people like you". If you're not taking a radical stance (and I call out "Yet another article...", as radical), then something else is driving this vehemence and absolute certainty that all CEOs are crooks and so are all the mainstream news agencies (NPR) reporting about them. I'm sorry if you've been personally hurt (or threatened, as I feel about the AI bubble; that's another story), but I don't feel informed from your comments, or inspired to _take up arms_ following your reasoning. I think, dammit. We're between a rock and the hard place, and I'm going to be late to act. But I'm not going to throw NPR on the pyre. I will defend conscientious reporting where ever I find it. [1]: I say "conclusion" because it must be a conclusion of reasoning to take the _may_ in the article you offered and insist it means _must_. [2]: using the novel definition of 'complex' vs. 'complicated' where complex differentiates systems with social dynamics separate from systems with organization charts.
recursivedoubts 3mo ago
The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch. From you had to know a guy to baseball TV announcers giving odds on a home run this inning in less than a decade. I know this is hard to conceive of, but there was a time when there were no gambling ads on TV! The crazy part? The other half of the ads you see on TV (pharmaceuticals) weren't there either!
- palmotea 3mo ago
  Yeah, it's terrible. One of the things that struck me (in a bad way) when I visited the UK in my 20s was how there were so many bookies everywhere. Now were basically in the same place here. Organized gambling is a net-negative for society, and should be banned, and the bookies are scum that should be driven back under the rocks they crawled out from.
  - catlover76 3mo ago
    [dead]
- lemoncookiechip 3mo ago
  It's not just the USA, it's happening in most of the EU too. Sports betting is especially rampant.
- tdeck 3mo ago
  Some time around 2015 I remember seeing Powell station in SF completely plastered with DraftKings ads and thinking "wait, I thought that was illegal". It seems to have only snowballed since then. In 2020 I was in downtown Philadelphia before the election and saw a massive screen with a Polymarket ad, and at that time Polymarket wasn't even legal in the US. From nicotine to gambling harmful habits that our society had managed to marginalize have gotten a fresh coat of tech slapped on them and seemingly escaped all constraints.
  - giancarlostoro 3mo ago
    Ecigs worry me the most since you really cannot tell what someone truly has in there, it could be nicotine, it could be “legal” THC or other random nonsense, I wouldnt know, it all looks the same. I have a friend who gave up cigarettes for ecigs but he is actually doing it for the nicotine, saves him a fortune, he was smoking a pack a week in NYC. My thing is, how healthy are ecigs compared to real cigarettes really?
ratelimitsteve 3mo ago
The ability to bet on the outcome of any event is a guarantee of corruption in any event. We've seen the president's teleprompter operator bet on his speeches, we've seen journalists threatened in an attempt to get them to reword an article in order to resolve a bet differently, we've seen several sports betting scandals. What we haven't seen is any indication that this will get better without regulation, and now we're seeing betting markets fight like hell to introduce their rot into the institutions at the bedrock of our society. It needs to stop.
- Whoppertime 3mo ago
  Doesn't the insurance market have the same moral hazard? If you are paying for fire insurance it promises you a bundle of cash if your business burns down. At that point if the finances of your company go into the red, your only chance of becoming whole financially might involve a fire, and then you start calling folks like Tony Soprano to find an arsonist
  - ratelimitsteve 3mo ago
    it does. because insurance is a bet. but it also has legislation and organized investigators behind it to drive up the risk of committing fraud (and, therefore, the necessary reward to justify it) whereas these bets-masquerading-as-financial-instruments don't. take the example from the OP: we have laws about falsifying votes and other obvious things like that, but you can bet on what time the last votes are accepted, what time the last votes are counted, which org will publish results first, will an org publish incorrect results, a lot of things that can potentially be manipulated without violating a law but would still weaken trust in our elections at a time when there is a decade long concerted effort to convince people that elections are being gamed and don't work.
  - TheCoelacanth 3mo ago
    To an extent, but insurance also serves a vital economic function of allowing people to spread out risk. The counter-parties in insurance are also sophisticated businesses who are highly motivated and capable of tracking down a significant portion of fraud. The counter-party in prediction markets is other gamblers who usually have no ability to investigate fraud whatsoever. The prediction markets have some motivation to prevent fraud to protect their reputations but they don't directly lose any money from fraud, so they aren't going to do it nearly as effectively as an insurance company.
totallygeeky 3mo ago
It seems entirely fair to me that you can't wager against something that you directly had a hand in the outcome of, even accepting the bunk premise that these wagers are legal in the first place. So much outrage nowadays is driven by a belief that people are entitled to profit off of every possible thing in life, how dreadful.
freitasm 3mo ago
Probably because the grift never stops.
jnyst1985 2mo ago
Same playbook used by BNPL and neobanks…

91 points by hn_acker 3mo ago

mwigdahl 3mo ago

And to note, the law in question is from the 1800s -- hardly something novel Wisconsin is doing.

cwmoore 3mo ago
Like building more jails? Could there be a better way?

lovich 3mo ago

Yet another article where the media is sanewashing the subject at hand > Then there's the potential for insider trading, something that has dogged the prediction market industry, … From a 2025 article [1] > Coplan said, “Nobody is under the impression that nobody knows the answer, right? Like, of course, there’s people who are working on it that know when it’s going to come. And I think what’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market and the market to change, and all of a sudden it’s trading at 95 cents.” I didn’t know you could be described as being dogged by an issue that you actively courted and espoused. Additionally I remembered that quote but it took effort to find as it appears Kalshi and Polymarket decided the heat on those views was a little too much and have done a PR wave since January of this year to claim that they totally don’t support insider trading despite that being a core of their business concept. I guess we’ve always been at war with East Asia again, I’ll update my firmware to be a good little drone if even media organizations like npr and apnews are just going to be this blatant with reframing history [1] https://casinobeats.com/2025/11/20/polymarket-founder-shayne-coplan-insider-trading-cool-sportsbooks-scam/ https://casinobeats.com/2025/11/20/polymarket-founder-shayne...

mwigdahl 3mo ago
There's big money in it, so of course there's going to be a huge PR push to cast it as a great moral and societal good. The thing that gets me is that the rationalists who were such outspoken proponents of prediction markets (look up "futarchy" and the many positive articles about it) failed to predict the astonishing amounts of corruption that have come along for the ride with them.
- atmavatar 3mo ago
  Strictly speaking, we cannot say for sure they didn't predict the corruption -- merely that they didn't warn about it. For all we know, they're participating in the corruption, which is why they were outspoken proponents.
  - LargeWu 3mo ago
    Of course they're participating, even driving it. Notably there were large bets placed predicting imminent military actions in Iran and Venezuela. In at least one case it was verifiably placed by one of the individuals planning it. We've reached the point where our country's leaders can profit not by the outcome of the war, but even just by the very act of initiating it.
- water-data-dude 3mo ago
  I was never rabid about it, but I thought prediction markets were a cool idea for a while. I didn't anticipate all of the crazy second order effects.
  - totallyhuman 3mo ago
    Same here. I soured on it a bit when I noticed them becoming a bit of a rhetorical stick, "well if you think you're right, go place a bet!". I guess that's good if you want people to only make claims they seriously believe in, but it had a tendency to shut down discussion, and I feel like there's something valuable in being able to discuss and debate without the expectation that being right should be rewarded with money, and being wrong should be punished with same. The negative second-order effects I expected were more about people concealing information and analysis that they otherwise would have shared, replacing complex but informative discussions with a black-box oracle. Boy was I wrong.
rozab 3mo ago
The experience we have of sports betting shows that even extraordinarily well compensated sportspeople will cheat to influence events due to greed. That's not such a big problem for something that fundamentally does not matter (sports outcomes). As you apply it to things that do matter, like political appointments, actions in warzones, and even weather measurements, people will and have changed these outcomes to make money.
tzs 2mo ago
What are you talking about? Kalshi and Polymarket having to do a wave of publicity to try to take off the heat over insider trading shows that the issue of insider trading is in fact dogging the industry. The NPR article's level of discussion of insider trading is entirely appropriate for an article that is not about insider trading.
- lovich 2mo ago
  if an analogy would work for you, If my friend said they were planning on breaking and entering into homes to steal things for their income, and then complained that they were dogged by accusations of being a thief, I would call them out for being full of shit because they were getting called out for exactly what they planned on doing. If your argument is that NPR was correct in their description as being dogged by claims of insider trading, then I believe you and I have a difference of opinion on the connotations of the term "dogged" when it comes to describing accusations levied against you for behavior you 100% planned on engaging in.
xtiansimon 2mo ago
> “Yet another article where the media is sanewashing the subject at hand.” I agree this level of public gambling is crazy. Though I’m dismayed with the criticism of mainstream media not taking a stronger stance, which I take is your criticism. Isn’t that a page from the likes of Fox News? Bringing punditry into news? Moral outrage regarding what otherwise appears to be a legal business (online betting)? Even the link you provide used the word “hints” to describe insider trading: “Polymarket Founder Shayne Coplan Hints That Insider Trading is Cool & Sportsbooks are a Scam” I get that you’re angry, but I don’t understand why NPR is the villain.
- lovich 2mo ago
  They didn’t need moral outrage. They needed to not report on this like insider trading was some problem these companies were having that they were trying to avoid or fix when the CEOs have publicly stated it was their goal.
  - xtiansimon 2mo ago
    > _"They needed to not..."_ I think I'm reading a moral stance in your comments. Like Commandments. "Thou shall not bear false witness". Maybe a radical stance in the context of news? I conclude you're demanding "mainstream media" (NPR) adopt a radical type of reporting and, yes, outrage by the use of your term "sanewashing". This is where you lose me. NPR is a news machine designed for neutrality. If there's a failure, I would say it's *Naivete*. A presumption of regularity and the rule of law will prevail. And if the reporter was also naive, then it's in the face of <evidence>. What's the purpose of taking one article and painting all news media as corrupt? I'm ready to grant that your conclusion [1] _"CEOs have publicly stated [insider trading] was their goal"_ is possible for some CEO. And unless you're an insider or receiving private information (which you've not claimed here), then your ground knowledge comes from reporting. The problem with reporting that's not making an effort at neutrality as NPR does, is relying on sources whose positions are blatantly one-sided or whose information is so complex [2] only a few can determine its veracity from one article to the next. Mainstream News about complex issues fundamentally lags real-time, because it comes from the people who report it and from the people willing to go on record, and some editorial process of evaluation. The moral crisis of mainstream media has always been ownership (gatekeeping), but NPR is "funded by people like you". If you're not taking a radical stance (and I call out "Yet another article...", as radical), then something else is driving this vehemence and absolute certainty that all CEOs are crooks and so are all the mainstream news agencies (NPR) reporting about them. I'm sorry if you've been personally hurt (or threatened, as I feel about the AI bubble; that's another story), but I don't feel informed from your comments, or inspired to _take up arms_ following your reasoning. I think, dammit. We're between a rock and the hard place, and I'm going to be late to act. But I'm not going to throw NPR on the pyre. I will defend conscientious reporting where ever I find it. [1]: I say "conclusion" because it must be a conclusion of reasoning to take the _may_ in the article you offered and insist it means _must_. [2]: using the novel definition of 'complex' vs. 'complicated' where complex differentiates systems with social dynamics separate from systems with organization charts.

recursivedoubts 3mo ago

The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch. From you had to know a guy to baseball TV announcers giving odds on a home run this inning in less than a decade. I know this is hard to conceive of, but there was a time when there were no gambling ads on TV! The crazy part? The other half of the ads you see on TV (pharmaceuticals) weren't there either!

palmotea 3mo ago
Yeah, it's terrible. One of the things that struck me (in a bad way) when I visited the UK in my 20s was how there were so many bookies everywhere. Now were basically in the same place here. Organized gambling is a net-negative for society, and should be banned, and the bookies are scum that should be driven back under the rocks they crawled out from.
- catlover76 3mo ago
  [dead]
lemoncookiechip 3mo ago
It's not just the USA, it's happening in most of the EU too. Sports betting is especially rampant.
tdeck 3mo ago
Some time around 2015 I remember seeing Powell station in SF completely plastered with DraftKings ads and thinking "wait, I thought that was illegal". It seems to have only snowballed since then. In 2020 I was in downtown Philadelphia before the election and saw a massive screen with a Polymarket ad, and at that time Polymarket wasn't even legal in the US. From nicotine to gambling harmful habits that our society had managed to marginalize have gotten a fresh coat of tech slapped on them and seemingly escaped all constraints.
- giancarlostoro 3mo ago
  Ecigs worry me the most since you really cannot tell what someone truly has in there, it could be nicotine, it could be “legal” THC or other random nonsense, I wouldnt know, it all looks the same. I have a friend who gave up cigarettes for ecigs but he is actually doing it for the nicotine, saves him a fortune, he was smoking a pack a week in NYC. My thing is, how healthy are ecigs compared to real cigarettes really?

ratelimitsteve 3mo ago

The ability to bet on the outcome of any event is a guarantee of corruption in any event. We've seen the president's teleprompter operator bet on his speeches, we've seen journalists threatened in an attempt to get them to reword an article in order to resolve a bet differently, we've seen several sports betting scandals. What we haven't seen is any indication that this will get better without regulation, and now we're seeing betting markets fight like hell to introduce their rot into the institutions at the bedrock of our society. It needs to stop.

Whoppertime 3mo ago
Doesn't the insurance market have the same moral hazard? If you are paying for fire insurance it promises you a bundle of cash if your business burns down. At that point if the finances of your company go into the red, your only chance of becoming whole financially might involve a fire, and then you start calling folks like Tony Soprano to find an arsonist
- ratelimitsteve 3mo ago
  it does. because insurance is a bet. but it also has legislation and organized investigators behind it to drive up the risk of committing fraud (and, therefore, the necessary reward to justify it) whereas these bets-masquerading-as-financial-instruments don't. take the example from the OP: we have laws about falsifying votes and other obvious things like that, but you can bet on what time the last votes are accepted, what time the last votes are counted, which org will publish results first, will an org publish incorrect results, a lot of things that can potentially be manipulated without violating a law but would still weaken trust in our elections at a time when there is a decade long concerted effort to convince people that elections are being gamed and don't work.
- TheCoelacanth 3mo ago
  To an extent, but insurance also serves a vital economic function of allowing people to spread out risk. The counter-parties in insurance are also sophisticated businesses who are highly motivated and capable of tracking down a significant portion of fraud. The counter-party in prediction markets is other gamblers who usually have no ability to investigate fraud whatsoever. The prediction markets have some motivation to prevent fraud to protect their reputations but they don't directly lose any money from fraud, so they aren't going to do it nearly as effectively as an insurance company.

totallygeeky 3mo ago

It seems entirely fair to me that you can't wager against something that you directly had a hand in the outcome of, even accepting the bunk premise that these wagers are legal in the first place. So much outrage nowadays is driven by a belief that people are entitled to profit off of every possible thing in life, how dreadful.

freitasm 3mo ago

Probably because the grift never stops.

jnyst1985 2mo ago

Same playbook used by BNPL and neobanks…