Fictional example: In The Chosen by Ricardo Pinto, the Emperor is elected by the entire body of nobles descended from a semi-legendary ancestor, but the number of votes is determined by a calculated blood quantum representing the percent of your total ancestry from that person. (In the book, the exceptionally pure-blooded dowager empress casts something like a quarter million votes by herself, but she is nonetheless outvoted by a coalition of most of the rest of the nobles.)
One could imagine something similar for the US where voting rights are apportioned according to your ancestry from the Mayflower or the like.
Or: all citizens are granted a single vote upon reaching the age of majority, but they are free to permanently sell that vote. Current vote holders are recorded in a public registry. There is a large and thriving vote-trading market. Savvy players will buy up large numbers of votes before an election that they care about, then sell them off before elections of lesser importance.
It seems much harder to track sales-per-election, and it seems to involve a lot more overhead. Specifically, before every election, you have to remember to put your vote up for sale, and this is likely to involve enough effort that most people won’t do it, which means that available votes will be scarce before niche elections.
Fictional example: In The Chosen by Ricardo Pinto, the Emperor is elected by the entire body of nobles descended from a semi-legendary ancestor, but the number of votes is determined by a calculated blood quantum representing the percent of your total ancestry from that person. (In the book, the exceptionally pure-blooded dowager empress casts something like a quarter million votes by herself, but she is nonetheless outvoted by a coalition of most of the rest of the nobles.)
One could imagine something similar for the US where voting rights are apportioned according to your ancestry from the Mayflower or the like.
Or: all citizens are granted a single vote upon reaching the age of majority, but they are free to permanently sell that vote. Current vote holders are recorded in a public registry. There is a large and thriving vote-trading market. Savvy players will buy up large numbers of votes before an election that they care about, then sell them off before elections of lesser importance.
You don’t even need fiction for that one. Look into the old Sila kingdom (3 kingdoms period of Korea) bone rank system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone-rank_system
why permanently selling vs selling per election?
It seems much harder to track sales-per-election, and it seems to involve a lot more overhead. Specifically, before every election, you have to remember to put your vote up for sale, and this is likely to involve enough effort that most people won’t do it, which means that available votes will be scarce before niche elections.