[unethical_ban]

"Get money out of politics"

also

"It is a shame that a financial incentive to manpiulate elections or to vote for a candidate for any reason except the voter's confidence in that candidate got banned"

I'm not saying I definitely want political bookies banned, but I don't immediately see how it is anything but a detriment to honest decision making in choosing how to respond to issues. Maybe I'll vote to take away some human rights if the election is close and I can make a few bucks?

[karlkeefer]

Prediction markets have a built-in incentive for accuracy that's absent from broadcast news. It's useful to have an aggregate answer to things like "how likely is Russia to invade Ukraine" that is to some degree shielded from the normal filters of partisanship.

Or from another angle:

Changing your individual vote in an attempt to shift the outcome of an election is extraordinarily unlikely to actually make the difference, so prediction markets most likely punish people (with losses) who try to game it with their own votes. If you and a large group of people plan to do this, that will be priced into the market, preventing you from profiting very much.

[Dylan16807]

I think these markets were a few orders of magnitude too small for the latter to happen.