The Kalshi betting exchange will begin offering event contracts on the US presidential election today. This comes after the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission failed to prove that such betting markets would damage the public interest.
The Wednesday ruling upheld a decision by a lower court.
The DC Circuit wrote in the ruling that “ensuring the integrity of elections and avoiding improper interference and misinformation are undoubtedly paramount public interests, and a substantiated risk of distorting the electoral process would amount to irreparable harm.”
But, the ruling continued:
“The problem is that the CFTC has given this court no concrete basis to conclude that event contracts would likely be a vehicle for such harms.”
Kalshi featured a fully built-out elections page by Thursday morning, with markets including:
- Presidential-election winner (which is scheduled to launch this afternoon)
- Party control of the Senate
- Party control of the House of Representatives
- The number of presidential debates between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump
Kalshi will joining the PredictIt exchange market – which has maneuvered its own legal obstacles in recent years – as legal options for gambling on politics in the US. Betting on elections is banned in all 40 US jurisdictions with legal sports betting.
Election Betting Touts Consecutive Court Wins
The CFTC refused a Kalshi request to offer markets on control of the House and Senate in June 2023, but the DC Circuit Court found the government's stance unsupported in a September opinion. The CFTC appealed and asked for an emergency stay, which culminated in the ruling this week.
Opponents of these types of markets cite a possible erosion of public trust in elections. Before political polling, election betting was used by campaigns and journalists to determine public opinion ahead of voting. Kalshi CEO and co-founder Tarek Mansour conjured this history in a statement to Reuters after the September ruling.
"Now is finally the time to allow these markets to show the world just how powerful they are at providing signal amidst the noise and giving us more truth about what the future holds," he said in a written statement.
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