Can the political betting markets be rigged?

The theory is that political betting can actually be more accurate than polling.

When money is on the line, informed people, perhaps including insiders, have an incentive to turn their knowledge into cash by making big bets. In the process they make the odds more accurate. And of course, there are several reasons to lie to pollsters, but no reasons to make a money-losing bet.

Of course there are reasons to make losing bets. As the article points out, a person interested in swaying popular opinion of electability could make big bets on a candidate to boost their standing as a viable candidate.

Economists Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz have pointed out that Hillary Clinton's chances of becoming president, as predicted by one betting market, InTrade, started to climb dramatically mid-May, topping 40 percent after months of fluctuating between 20 percent and 30 percent. Her odds of winning the Democratic nomination stayed around 50 percent, implying that if nominated, her chance of then winning the presidency would be about 80 percent. You can't get much more electable than that.

And they think there may have been attempts at intentional manipulation in that rise.

But running for office is a very serious endeavor in which people look at a candidate's political positions on issues that matter to them and then make informed and rational decisions. It is not a popularity contest. No, no, no. Nothing like that at all, at all. Because people aren't afraid to be behind a losing candidate as long as they are supporting a candidate with whom they share a deep seeded set of core beliefs and policy positions. Yes, yes. And candidates never change their position on things once elected to support the positions of their major financial backers.

If politics is a rigged game to begin with, why wouldn't political betting also be rigged? Wouldn't it be more of a shock if we discovered that nobody was attempting to manipulate the data?

Of course if someone wanted to place a $1 bet on Jake, if I win the return would be quite substantial.