Readers write

SAVE Act ignores prediction market influence

President Donald Trump said that prediction markets are more accurate than “fake polls.” Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, invested in Polymarket, a major online prediction market where users can bet on elections. Trump Jr. also serves as an adviser to both Polymarket and its competitor, Kalshi.

Betting on prediction markets can improperly influence election outcomes. Government employees could use classified information or nonpublic information to trade and profit on prediction markets.

An Army master sergeant allegedly used classified insider knowledge of the Venezuela raid, betting roughly $33,000 in the prediction market and won over $400,000. Trump’s teleprompter operator allegedly used nonpublic information to make more than $100,000 by betting on a prediction market on specific words and phrases Trump would say during public addresses.

Just like with gambling, as the odds change, voters could be influenced by the odds. Prediction market betting could fuel misinformation and efforts to influence election outcomes.

The hypocrisy is that Trump’s SAVE Act is supposedly intended to make elections free from improper influence, but it does not address prediction markets. That hypocrisy exposes that he is not really interested in making elections free from improper influences — he wants power and wealth.

ANTHONY L. COCHRAN, ATLANTA

Republicans forsake conservative values to side with Trump

Republicans seem to be growing increasingly out of touch in their labeling of Democrats. House Speaker Mike Johnson is the latest (AJC, July 28), warning that “Communism is no longer a far-fetched threat. It is here on our shores!”

Far from having moved to the left, current Democrats are truer to several values that Johnson once claimed as conservative than Republicans are. According to his “7 Core Principles of Conservatism,” a 2018 manifesto drafted for Republican legislators, the basic guard against “government encroachment” is a “vital separation of powers, and a necessary system of checks and balances.”

Yet Republican majorities have repeatedly given up their oversight responsibilities, granting the executive branch virtually unchecked power.

According to Johnson, conservatives believe “competition should be encouraged, and government intervention and regulation should be limited.” But Republicans have not questioned the administration’s reliance on no-bid contracts and erratic economic manipulation.

If conservatives believe that “public and private virtue should be encouraged and justice must be administered equally and impartially to all,” where is Republican opposition to profit-taking by the president, his family and friends or to personally motivated investigations and prosecutions?

This year there are good reasons for true conservatives to vote for Democrats.