This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
In February, the United States Department of Defense threatened to designate the AI firm Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” after a dispute over the military’s use of the company’s Claude models.
Under pressure from the rising far right, Berlin is letting Taliban officials staff Afghan missions in exchange for more deportations. Activists say the arrangement puts them at risk.
By NETTE NÖSTLINGER
in Berlin
Illustration by Arnau Busquets Guàrdia/POLITICO
Zarmina Paryani and her four sisters fear they may soon have to again face the persecutors they fled from in Afghanistan — and this time inside Germany.
Paryani and her sisters were imprisoned twice in Kabul for protesting against the Taliban after the Afghan militants retook the capital in 2021, the 27-year-old said. After going into hiding for several months, the family eventually made their way to Germany in search of safe haven.
But now, Berlin has struck a Faustian bargain that allows the Taliban to deepen its diplomatic foothold in Germany in return for cooperation on deporting Afghan migrants back to Afghanistan. For Paryani and other Afghan activists who resisted the Taliban at home, the arrangement is giving their former persecutors new leverage over their lives in exile.
“It’s hard to accept that my fate and my affairs are being discussed with the very same representatives whose oppression, prisons, whippings and violence I fled from,” Paryani, who worked as a midwife in Kabul and now lives in western Germany, told POLITICO.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government first struck a deal with the Afghan government announced last October that gives Taliban officials control of diplomatic missions in Berlin and Bonn in exchange for permission to return Afghan migrants directly to Afghanistan. That cooperation was deepened early this summer with a deal that allows more Taliban officials to work in Germany in return for cooperation on additional deportation flights — now up to three per month.
Under the new deal, Germany has expanded deportations to include not only Afghan men convicted of crimes, but also, more broadly, Afghan men with no protected status or legal right to remain in Germany.
The agreement with the Taliban makes Germany an outlier in Europe, making it the first EU country to allow Taliban-appointed officials to work in diplomatic missions inside the country. Before the agreement, Western-oriented Afghan officials representing the former government in Afghanistan had remained in charge.
The arrangement comes as Merz’s government grapples with rock-bottom approval ratings and the rise of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now the country’s most popular political force, according to polls. The AfD’s surge comes ahead of two elections in the former East Germany, where the far-right party is ahead in polls by wide margins. In one of those states, Saxony-Anhalt, the party may take real governing power for the first time since it was founded in 2013, a result that would serve as a great humiliation for the conservative Merz, who was elected chancellor last year partly on a promise to crack down on migration.
The AfD’s rise is piling pressure on the chancellor to deliver on his election pledge to deport more migrants — even as he insists that working with the Taliban does not legitimize a regime notorious for its human rights abuses. Overall, Afghans are the third-largest group of refugees or people who have fled war to come to Germany, behind Ukrainians and Syrians.
“We are not extending a hand to this Taliban regime,” Merz said in the German parliament in June. “Rather, we are seeking cooperation at the necessary technical level, which is in our country’s national interest.”
For Afghan rights activists in Germany, one of the worst consequences of Berlin’s deal with the Taliban is that it may particularly put at risk some 35,000 Afghans who came to Germany under special humanitarian programs for people deemed especially vulnerable to the Taliban. They include Paryani and her sisters in addition to thousands of human rights activists and Afghans who worked with the German military during its nearly two-decade presence in the country.
Paryani and others fear they will have to face the Taliban when attempting to renew their Afghan passports — which they need to extend their humanitarian visas — at Afghan diplomatic missions. Another 321,000 Afghans live in Germany as refugees or with other forms of protected status. They do not necessarily need Afghan passports, unless they want to apply for a permanent residence status.
More generally, activists and refugees also fear the Taliban, with their growing presence in Germany, could gain access to personal information held in databases in German missions, including details about their families, making them susceptible to blackmail and extortion.
“Given my personal history and my stance on extremism, I am concerned for my safety and that of my family,” one former teacher from Afghanistan granted anonymity due to his fear of retribution from the Taliban told POLITICO.
The former teacher, who lives in Germany with a humanitarian visa, said German immigration officials have asked him to renew his expired Afghan passport, a request that he fears will force him to deal directly with his persecutors.
“This situation continues to cause me significant psychological distress,” he said. “Sometimes I wake up at night because of nightmares related to the Taliban and this situation.”
With its handling of the Taliban, Merz’s government is setting a precedent that will be closely watched by other EU countries. Government officials in Austria and Belgium have said they’re watching Germany’s cooperation with the Taliban closely. Taliban officials also held talks focused on deportations with the EU Commission in June in Brussels.
But Hamid Nangialay Kabiri, the former head of the Afghan consulate in Bonn, who quit last September in protest over the initial deal allowing Taliban officials to serve in diplomatic missions in Germany, warned that the German government’s decision to cooperate with the Afghan regime would come back to haunt it — and that the Taliban would use their new leverage over Germany to advance their interests in Europe, including by building networks that intimidate dissidents.
“They are destroying my country, and now they are coming here,” he said. “They are not thinking of diplomacy. They have a lot of plans in their mind.”
It’s a sentiment politicians inside the left-leaning opposition also share.
“The German government has made itself vulnerable to blackmail,” Schahina Gambir, a lawmaker for the Greens who was born in Kabul, told POLITICO. “We’re seeing recognition through the back door. The Taliban are being granted access to embassies, they’re being granted immunity, they’re given channels for dialogue — and at the same time, the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan is getting worse and worse.”
There are already signs that the Taliban are exercising their newfound leverage.
Last May, Kabul unexpectedly halted a deportation flight at the last minute, seemingly seeking to extract additional concessions from the German government. A couple of weeks later, Berlin announced the terms of the latest agreement allowing additional Taliban-appointed officials to work at diplomatic missions in Germany.
Officials in Berlin depicted the new deal as a victory and a practical necessity, allowing for more deportations.
“To increase the number of repatriations, more passports must be issued, more identities must be verified, and so on,” Martin Giese, a spokesperson for Germany’s foreign ministry, said at the time. “To this end, it will also be necessary for more consular officials to be involved.”
But Paryani, the Afghan midwife who fled to Germany with her four sisters, said the Taliban would use their new power to torment them in the country they had sought safety in.
“A Taliban member once wrote to me: ‘Just wait until our embassy in Germany reopens. Then we’ll find you there,'” she said of a comment that had surfaced under one of her social media posts about two years ago. She then deemed it irrelevant because it seemed so unrealistic.
“Today, I feel as though that threat has become a reality,” she said.
Germany is being hit by hybrid warfare attacks from foreign powers on a “daily” basis, the country’s interior minister has warned, after a drone packed with explosives was found at Leipzig Airport earlier this week.
Espionage, sabotage, cyber attacks and covert actions “with the aim of destabilizing Germany or directly harming it” are a “constant reality,” German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told BILD in an interview on Sunday.
Dobrindt suggested on Thursday that a drone incident at Leipzig Airport may have been an attack by a state actor. The minister has stopped short of specifying which foreign powers are behind the hybrid attacks.
Leipzig Airport serves as a strategic hub for NATO, including for military transports to Ukraine. The airport is also the international courier service DHL’s largest European air hub and serves as a temporary home for some Ukrainian Antonov aircraft, protecting them from Russian attacks. An armed drone was found just meters away from such a plane, German officials said Wednesday.
A spokesperson for Germany’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday that Russia is behind daily attempts to “exert influence here in Germany in a manner that seeks to undermine our democracy and erode trust in politics and politicians.”
The Kremlin has been accused of seeking to sway September’s elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania, states in the former communist East Germany where pro-Russian sentiment remains strong and where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party could take power for the first time at the state level.
Owner of X and world’s first trillionaire Elon Musk attacked French presidential candidate Marine Tondelier on Thursday, after the Greens party leader said French authorities should be able to suspend the platform during electoral campaigns in case of foreign interference.
“I demand that she be shut down for treason against France!” Musk wrote on X, prompting a strong reaction from Tondelier.
“France does not need lessons in patriotism from a foreign billionaire who thinks he gets to decide which European political leaders should be silenced. Democracy is not for sale. Not even to the richest man in the world,” she responded.
“I’d rather be accused of defending democracy than of trying to buy it.”
Musk, who is a former adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, has regularly weighed in on European politics and thrown his support behind far-right candidates and parties — and France is no exception.
In July, Musk said far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was “France’s last hope,” but her National Rally party was quick to downplay his backing to avoid being associated with the controversial owner of Tesla and SpaceX.
Hard-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon also slammed Musk’s attacks against Tondelier on Thursday, before accusing the French government of not doing enough to fight foreign interference.
“The French presidential election is an open bar for all the manipulators in the world,” he wrote — a criticism Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot promptly rejected.
Earlier this week, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the government was boosting efforts to detect and punish foreign interference in the upcoming 2027 election, while presidential candidates Gabriel Attal and Édouard Philippe, as well as likely candidate Raphaël Glucksmann shared they had been victims of Russian disinformation campaigns.
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It’s August in Brussels, which means it’s vacation time.
Whether you’re heading off to the beach or holding down the fort in town, this episode is brimming with book recommendations from our newsroom and from you, our listeners. Whatever your genre preference, from true crime thrillers to deep political dives, we’ve got your summer holiday covered.
But this installment is not just a book chat.
We’re also tackling the rise of populism and the crises facing liberal democracies around the world. That’s the topic of “Defeating Trumpism,” a new book by former Belgian Prime Minister and European Parliament Member Guy Verhofstadt. The book is a self-diagnosis from one of Europe’s most passionate centrists about the failures of his movement. And his prescription? A new political paradigm he calls “Citizenism.”
We’re on a break for two weeks, so expect us to pop back up on your feed with the daily Brussels Playbook Podcast on Aug. 24 and the Week Ender podcast on Aug. 28.
Questions? Comments? Get in touch! You can message us or send a voice message to our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.
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BRUSSELS — When French and German security chiefs announced plans last month to develop a “European sovereign digital backbone,” tech and defense industry insiders on both sides of the Atlantic knew what they really meant: Adieu Palantir.
Across Europe, the hunt is on for alternatives to the U.S.-based data analytics company that a growing number of government officials believe is too deeply lodged in some of the most sensitive areas of government, from local policing and global intelligence to national defense and health systems.
Yet it is precisely Palantir’s crucial functions in daily workflows, and its largely unmatched data expertise, that will make it extremely hard for Europe to cut it off in pursuit of greater digital sovereignty.
“Let’s be honest, Palantir’s product is very good and addictive, it’s pretty much like the sugar in Coca-Cola,” said French digital sovereignty advocate, Philippe Latombe. “Palantir can treat massive amounts of data with great precision and with their experience, they had time to improve their algorithms with many clients and adapt them to many use cases.”
Still, the drive to break free from Palantir is sweeping across the continent, from Madrid, where the government of Pedro Sánchez has instructed state-backed companies to block Palantir from future public procurement contracts, to France’s domestic intelligence services (DGSI) selecting French company ChapsVision over Palantir. In Britain, the next test may come in February 2027, when the new Labour government of Andy Burnham will face a choice of whether to cut off Palantir’s £330 million National Health Service Federated Data Platform contract.
Last month’s decision by the French and German intelligence agencies to choose ChapsVision was a double-blow for Palantir’s leadership. CEO Alex Karp showed little patience for the sudden turn away from his company’s wares, declaring that he wasn’t worried about European competitors. “We have a model of what doesn’t work,” he quipped last week on Fox Business. “It’s called Europe.”
Olivier Dellenbach, ChapsVision’s chief executive, told POLITICO that his company has benefited from what he calls a “visceral rejection of Palantir” in Europe.
But he also cautioned that he did not want ChapsVision reduced to an anti-Palantir way out. Digital sovereignty, he argues, will remain an empty phrase unless governments turn it into industrial policy. “We need more public procurement,” Dellenbach said.
Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Romania, the Netherlands and Canada have already shown interest in the French Army’s Artemis AI, according to Patrick Moreau, one of the architects of the solution built by French aerospace and defense company Thales.
“They all want to be able to choose a sovereign solution that is compatible with NATO standards,” he said. “Unlike Palantir’s black box.”
But for now, even officials who want sovereign alternatives acknowledge that Europe’s replacement market remains fragmented and European companies are yet to match Palantir’s scale and track record.
Admiral Pierre Vandier, NATO’s supreme allied commander transformation, recently told POLITICO the alliance has no viable alternative to Palantir’s battlefield AI technology.
Another NATO official, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said that Palantir’s system has an unmatched capacity to sift through mountains of satellite imagery to help identify a target, advise on the weapon to strike it, inform how much ammunition is required — and automatically put in an order to replenish the stock.
“As far as I know, today there is no real competitor for Palantir,” Vandier said in May.
Co-founded by Karp and billionaire investor Peter Thiel, Palantir built its reputation inside the U.S. national security apparatus. Today, the company has a market capitalization of $330 billion.
Thiel has been one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump, while the company’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Israeli military has come in for criticism from Amnesty International and others for alleged human rights violations. Adding to unease about Palantir’s ideology-driven business were recent revelations of Thiel’s secretive Dialog society, an invitation-only ideas club for the global elite, and Karp’s manifesto arguing that Palantir is the democratic West’s best hope to stay ahead of authoritarian rivals.
“Peter Thiel explains that the defense of freedom does not necessarily require democracy,” French member of Parliament Aurélien Saintoul, who wrote a report on foreign military dependencies, told POLITICO. “He is clearly putting technical means to serve his political project, and we are talking about technofascists here.”
A Palantir spokesperson who declined to be named dismissed such accusations as “ludicrous,” noting that similar characterizations about the company have been made recently by the Russian foreign ministry.
“We know what side we’re on, and who we’re standing with,” the spokesman said, citing ongoing work to support the Ukrainian military. “Since our inception, protecting privacy and civil liberties has served as the foundation for how we conduct our work across both public and private sector institutions. Western politicians should think hard about who the real enemy is and not allow themselves to be ventriloquized by the Kremlin.”
Many of the company’s European critics maintain that the Palantir question is much more about tech sovereignty than political ideology. Extracting the company from some of the most delicate corners of European security structures would offer a blueprint for claiming more technological independence.
Instead, if governments in Europe cannot wean themselves off a company that provides software solutions, it would reveal how unrealistic hopes are to reduce dependence on U.S. technology giants that provide cloud infrastructure and hardware.
There is also the uncomfortable reality that at the same time that political leaders are calling for a break from Palantir, Europe’s biggest banks and asset managers have dramatically increased their investments in the U.S. company over the past year as it positions itself to profit from the AI gold rush, reports investigative outlet Follow the Money.
Palantir’s European foothold was built long before the current boom in AI. A hallmark of its growth was that it never wasted a crisis to demonstrate its value for governments in need.
In France, for instance, Palantir arrived in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks as security services scrambled to respond to a fervent public backlash on how they could have allowed such a tragedy to happen. The domestic intelligence agency signed a contract with the data analytics giant in 2016.
A similar pattern played out in Germany, where Palantir’s first major deployment came in Frankfurt, in the central state of Hesse, where police purchased Palantir’s Gotham in 2017 and deployed it under the name hessenDATA. It proved to be a crucial tool for officers to turn sprawling information into leads to help solve crimes.
Germany remains deeply divided over whether to use Palantir’s software. At the national level, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has pushed to expand the use of Palantir and introduced legislation that could pave the way for broader federal use. But the move has run into opposition from coalition partners the Social Democrats, as well as senior security officials.
The same crisis-to-contract pattern appeared in the U.K. during the Covid-19 pandemic. Palantir’s relationship with the National Health Service (NHS) began when it was paid a nominal £1 fee to help aggregate data during the crisis, according to Palantir’s U.K. lead Louis Mosley.
Europol, the EU’s police agency, used Palantir’s Gotham platform from 2016 to 2021 before ultimately dropping it. For one Europol official who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter freely, the problem with Palantir is less ideological than practical. Yes, the platform is expensive, raises sovereignty concerns and leaves clients dependent on Palantir for updates, the official said. But the more basic question is whether every agency needs the full Palantir machine.
“[Palantir] is really good when you have massive amounts of data and want to connect everything,” they said. “But that is not the case for us. In many cases, the alternatives are close enough. If we used it, I’m not sure our efficiency would increase dramatically.”
Part of Palantir’s approach in Europe is to hire former officials from the institutions it wants as customers. OpenDemocracy reported that Palantir hired four former officials from the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence before winning a £240 million MoD contract.
Moreover, Palantir is now seeking new business on the continent in defense.
On Jul. 1, Palantir’s Maven Smart System — which was first used by the Pentagon — became fully operational at NATO, meaning it’s been given security clearance to operate on the classified network. According to a NATO statement, the platform links command-and-control systems across the Alliance.
“I think this is a very important milestone for European defense,” said Palantir’s U.K. chief Louis Mosley.
But Palantir’s grip on Europe does not stop at the doors of government or army barracks. It also runs through some of the continent’s industrial crown jewels. Airbus signed with Palantir in 2015, making Palantir’s Foundry the backbone of its aviation data platform. Automaker BMW, energy company British Petroleum and media publisher Axel Springer — POLITICO’s parent company — all use Foundry to improve their business productivity as well.
Even if Europe manages to loosen Palantir’s grip, the company’s model built on top of the latest AI large-language systems appears to only be getting stronger. On Jun. 30, Amazon Web Services said it would invest $1 billion in a new “Forward Deployed Engineering” organization, embedding teams of engineers inside customer headquarters to build AI systems alongside them.
Days later, Microsoft announced a $2.5 billion push to send 6,000 engineers and industry specialists into client organizations. Both initiatives echo Palantir’s pioneering model to not simply sell software but put engineers inside a buyer’s operation.
Both the strength of its products and the sensitive areas where they’re applied, make Palantir Europe’s sovereign test case par excellence. If governments and companies can replace a software layer that helps turn data into decisions, they may have a blueprint for clawing back some digital sovereignty. If they cannot, the next generation of AI tools from U.S. tech giants may prove even harder to quit.
“Europe’s public institutions cannot become dependent on software built by a small circle of U.S. tech billionaires with an obscure political worldview,” said German Green MEP Hannah Neumann, who sits on Parliament’s defense committee. “It would be like outsourcing part of the democratic state to a private intelligence service that answers neither to voters nor to parliament.”
David Pargamin contributed reporting from Paris.
Could you accidentally gamble away your right to vote?
If you live in Wisconsin, and you bought contracts on a prediction market like Kalshi about who would win elections there, you’ve done just that, according to state election officials. And they think that if you vote anyway, you could be prosecuted.
“We want voters to understand that they cannot legally make a bet on an election and cast a ballot in that same election,” Meagan Wolfe, administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said in a statement Tuesday, ahead of the state’s August 11 primaries.
The reason wasn’t a new law about online markets but a very old statute dating back to the year 1849 — just after Wisconsin became a state.
“No person shall be allowed to vote in any election in which the person has made or become interested, directly or indirectly, in any bet or wager depending upon the result of the election,” the statute reads.
The bipartisan commission also said those voters could be on the hook for felony exposure, if they know about the prohibition and vote anyway. Intentionally voting while not being qualified to do so is a felony, per state law. “It’s important for voters to understand the consequences if they bet on an election outcome,” Wolfe said.
Many other states have laws on the books against gambling on elections. Wisconsin is the first where officials are saying people are banned from voting if they do it through prediction markets.
And it may not be the last, since New York has a very similar provision in both its constitution and state law.
“In New York State, voting in an election in which an individual has placed any bet or wager on the result is prohibited,” Kathleen McGrath, director of public information for the New York State Board of Elections, told me.
The New York attorney general’s office has not yet issued a formal opinion on whether Kalshi and Polymarket election bettors are barred from voting in elections they’ve wagered on. But they’re currently locked in a court battle to try and get Kalshi regulated under state gambling laws.
All this makes for a potentially explosive situation in the upcoming midterms, given the rapid growth of the industry, which has rolled out massive advertising campaigns and sponsorship deals to attract customers this election cycle.
Prediction market companies have responded with fury. Benjamin Freeman of Kalshi posted on X that this was “insane,” blatantly unconstitutional,” “illegal,” “dishonest,” and “dystopian.” In an emailed statement, Kalshi said this was “incredibly dangerous to democracy.”
Bettors may be less perturbed. “The reaction I am party to is almost amused by how idiotic it is — how unenforceable, and backwards, and emblematic of government regulators,” said Alex Keeney, who founded Eventual, a prediction market podcast he co-hosts with traders.
But Wisconsin Elections Commission member Ann Jacobs, who flagged the issue earlier this year and helped create the new guidance, told me in an interview that the decision was not taken lightly.
“This has been the law for a long time,” she said. “And if you don’t like the law, go talk to your legislator.”
So, where did this old law come from? Could it actually be enforced? And would it hold up against court challenges?
It may seem surprising that a state would have such an old law of this nature on the books.
But, it turns out, many early 19th century Americans were degenerate election gamblers — so many that this became a topic of national conversation and condemnation.
In a 2012 paper, economic historian Paul Rhode and economist Koleman Strumpf wrote that betting on elections was “commonplace” since the US’s earliest years as a nation, but that it became “especially intense during the partisan conflicts of the Jacksonian era.” Newspapers, which in those days were mainly partisan, championed the practice.
Concerns eventually rose that election betting encouraged election rigging, just as people complain today that prop bets are corrupting sports. After the 1844 election, Rhode and Strumpf wrote, Whig Party members complained that “gamblers favoring Polk had committed voting fraud using the winnings from election bets to defray their expenses.”
Then, in 1845, the governor of New York, Silas Wright, urged his state legislature to make “the extensive and rapidly increasing practice of betting on elections” illegal, due to the “corrupting tendencies which it exerts upon the election itself.” And, Rhode and Strumpf continue, evangelicals “preached long and hard against election betting” as part of the second Great Awakening movement.
The craze eventually faded, but it was peaking just around the time Wisconsin became a state in 1848. So its new state constitution specifically addressed the issue, saying “laws may be passed” excluding election bettors “from the right of suffrage.” Hence the 1849 law.
In recent years, in the rare occasions when the law has been noticed at all, it’s been treated as an amusing, antiquated curiosity.
But the rise of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket — and the corresponding surge in election betting — made it relevant again.
In March, after Jacobs of the Wisconsin Elections Commission heard a radio story about Polymarket, she posted on X: “WI friends – I know it’s all the rage to bet on everything, but you cannot bet on an election in Wisconsin! If you do, your ballot can be challenged & thrown out.”
Kalshi has long taken the position that it doesn’t allow election “gambling,” but rather “financial products” called “event contracts.” But the commission’s legal staff studied the issue, and concluded earlier this month that it was “relatively clear” that a Wisconsinite “cannot, even indirectly” make a bet or wager on an election and then vote in that election.
The press release warning voters — and the backlash from Kalshi and Polymarket — soon followed.
So, what would happen, then, if an avid “event contract” trader decided to vote anyway?
Realistically, the answer is: probably nothing.
But if someone else had knowledge that this person was making election bets and voting, they could show up to try to get them disqualified.
“You would have to be there at the moment they showed up to vote — or when their absentee ballot is pulled out to be counted — and you’d say, ‘I’m challenging that voter,‘” Jeff Mandell, a Wisconsin election lawyer, told me. “But the chances that somebody is around with the right knowledge to block someone on one of these bases strikes me as pretty slender.”
The other theoretical risk is felony prosecution. Law enforcement officials could obtain information that people voted on elections they’d wagered on and, then, criminally charge them for voting illegally.
But Mandell pointed out that “that seems like a lot of work” for a prosecutor, adding, “I think that fears about enforcement, either civil or criminal, are probably overstated.”
Still, Jacobs argued, it’s possible. “This is the law,” Jacobs said. “It is a situation where, if people have placed a bet, they should consult with their own attorney and decide what to do.”
Since Wisconsin’s original state constitution specifically said the state could restrict election bettors from voting, the law would seem to be on firm ground.
There’s just one catch: That section of the constitution was repealed forty years ago.
That repeal was made as part of a broader overhaul of the document and doesn’t appear to have been specifically targeted at the election betting issue. But it does mean that the statute doesn’t necessarily have the firm state constitutional footing it once did.
“The current constitutional language only authorizes the legislature to disenfranchise voters on two grounds — a felony conviction or incompetency — which does suggest that disenfranchisement on other grounds is impermissible,” Robert Yablon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor, said in an email.
The law could also be challenged in federal court. As written, the law appears to prohibit even someone making a $1 bet with their friend on an election outcome from voting. Challengers could argue that law isn’t narrowly tailored enough to justify depriving qualified citizens of their voting rights.
For now, though, the law is on the books, and it says what it says.
“As a policy, it makes sense,” Jacobs told Vox. “You want people to make their voting decisions based on who they think is best for the job — not who’s going to make them the most money.”
Though the Wisconsin situation has made national headlines this week, it has largely escaped notice that New York has very similar provisions in both its constitution and in state law.
New York’s constitution says that no person who “shall make or become directly or indirectly interested in any bet or wager depending upon the result of any election, shall vote at such election.”
In fact, state law says that if a voter’s eligibility is challenged on these grounds, they must swear what is known as the “Bribery Oath,” swearing that they haven’t been paid to vote a certain way — and that they “have not made, or become directly or indirectly interested in any bet or wager depending upon the result of this election.”
When I inquired with New York state officials about whether these provisions about bets and wagers applied to Kalshi and Polymarket election event contracts, they declined to comment specifically on that.
But the New York attorney general’s office has repeatedly taken the position, both in their public rhetoric and in court, that prediction markets are “gambling platforms” that should be regulated by state gambling law. (Earlier this month, a judge gave the state a favorable ruling in a suit brought by Kalshi over this, though Kalshi is appealing.)
If New York reaches a similar interpretation as Wisconsin, Kalshi or Polymarket bettors on elections would not be legally permitted to vote in those elections. Of course, doing that comes with a risk of voter disenfranchisement, especially if this guidance isn’t well-publicized or is only belatedly clarified.
So, in both states, these very old laws have collided with a modern trend — and the result is a big mess.
I wanted to direct your attention to this podcast episode from Slate. It’s actually the first episode of a series Slate is doing on popular constitutionalism. (The page linked above is paywalled. But, I’m told, the ‘By the People’ pod series itself is not. So you should be able to find it on podcast platforms.) It brings together in a engaging and coherent way a number of themes we’ve been discussing over the last couple years about the problem of and the corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court. And it frames the question around a 20-year-old book on popular constitutionalism by Larry Kramer (The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review).
It’s been just over a year since a shooter in Minnesota attacked two Democratic state lawmakers and their families in their homes — killing state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, while injuring state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. This “night of terror” stunned the political world: the shooter had a hit list and intended to carry out more assassinations of state elected officials, according to federal prosecutors.
Only a couple of months later, Charlie Kirk, the conservative founder of the Turning Point USA student political organization, was fatally shot at a campus event. As young and politically engaged Americans watched footage of his killing travel across social media, many worried that civic life would never be the same — and whether it was even safe for them to participate.
“It was terrifying and it was horrible and I will never forget where I was when I heard the news of Charlie Kirk,” Katie Fire Thunder, a 26-year-old Democratic member of the Montana House of Representatives, told me recently.
At the time of Kirk’s death, the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe member was preparing to enter public service herself — she’d go on to be appointed in December 2025 to replace a retiring state representative after years of political organizing and activist work — and was suddenly pondering if it would be worth it.
It was not the first time she’d had the thought. Growing up, she was well aware that public officials faced violence — whether at a community event, or a baseball practice, or at their home — even as she was drawn to the idea of service.
“Strangely, I always had a fear when I was little of being assassinated — I don’t know what it was, but I remember telling my mom, ‘I think I want to be a judge or an attorney, but I’m too scared that someone would get upset at me and try and come after me and shoot me’,” she told me.
Yet the calling to pass policy and engage communities won out. She’s now running for a full term in office — and wrestling with what the future will hold for her as polarization and political violence seem to be reaching new heights in tandem.
“Now being an elected official, I’m really like, ‘Okay, what was little Katie thinking?’ And I’m really trying to process that,” she said.
In conversations with young politicians and public servants, people in both parties described going through a similar journey. They feel a calling to change the status quo, an imperative to serve their neighbors and help the marginalized, and a drive to replace the aging establishment. But in addition to all the other challenges of politics — poor pay, demanding work schedules, nonstop fundraising — they’re increasingly grappling with the risk of violent retribution.
These fears are already shaping the next era of politics — changing how leaders behave, how they engage with constituents, and whether they run at all. In ways subtle and loud, the costs will be borne by all of us.
Security challenges — in the shadow of the Hortman and Kirk killings — dominated discussions at a gathering of Gen Z and millennial state lawmakers last week on Capitol Hill.
The four-day event was organized by Future Caucus, a bipartisan political organization that supports rising young lawmakers. Speakers and panelists discussed ways elected officials can modernize legislatures, craft policy, and exchange tips on being young and in office.
But a recurring question hung over the room: Who even wants to run for public office these days? And what’s preventing a new generation of leadership from sticking with the job once they’re in?
Security was tight this year, just like last year’s Future Summit, which took place just days after Hortman’s killing. Attendees weren’t advertised before the event, guards buzzed around elevators and conference room entrances, and scheduling and programming was not released in advance, including to news media.
These preventive measures, combined with panel conversations about the trade-offs of public service, emphasized the struggles these young politicians from both parties are facing: balancing openness, accessibility, and idealism with the reality that the very efforts they make to organize and participate in their communities may put their digital and physical safety and security at risk.
“Most electeds have to use social media in order to be successful and it also opens us up to critical attacks from people whose identities we can’t often verify,” Tiara Mack, a 32-year-old Democratic state senator from Rhode Island, told me. “We have to be able to reach a broad audience, which also means a broad audience can reach us.”
Since first being elected to the state legislature, she has received countless death threats, bigoted verbal abuse, and a terrifying episode of doxxing a couple of years ago: after a video of herself twerking in support of reproductive rights went viral, her home address and the floor plans of her apartment were posted online.
“When I had my floor plans leaked and when I had bomb squad dogs come to my home, circle my building to make sure that there were no bombs — very few people know what that experience is like,” she told me.
The incident caused her to reconsider whether her political career was worth continuing. Instead of leaving public service, though, she and her colleagues looked together for ways to feel safer and more in control. But these measures often come with sacrifices, including keeping constituents at a distance at a time when young voters frequently want more engagement, more access, and more authenticity from their leaders.
Though she uses Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, and Facebook actively, Mack draws a line at indulging in parasocial relationships with followers who she doesn’t know offline. She and her colleagues employ a “post-and-ghost” policy online now: publishing content online and then deliberately not reading or replying to the comments. She doesn’t advertise event locations in advance, only sending out addresses after RSVPs are submitted. She doesn’t post her location online until after she has left a place, and she tries to keep a polite and politically neutral tone online now.
Most shocking to herself — and particularly the version of herself who first ran for office in the pre-pandemic era — is her rethinking her stance on carrying a firearm.
“That’s now a conversation I’ve had with some of my colleagues, who are grappling with what it would mean for me as someone who sponsored gun safety legislation to pursue a concealed weapons permit,” Mack told me. “And it’s a hard conversation, but I think it’s become more necessary and more and more people and women of color that I know personally are having that conversation, including myself.”
On the policy front, state lawmakers have discussed new security rules, some relevant campaign finance reforms, and mutual assurances to tone down rhetoric.
Speaking during a Future Summit panel, 35-year-old Minnesota state Rep. Isaac Schultz, a Republican, shared some of the hard lessons learned from last year’s killings. The state capitol used to have an open-door policy — “we’re a state that believes in high-contact politics,” he said — but weapons screenings now happen at the two building entrances. The Minnesota state patrol and local law enforcement now have a dedicated communications system with the sergeants-at-arms of each legislative chamber — a “massive change” from before the killings, which revealed the poor channels of communication that existed.
“We had colleagues on a hit list who didn’t have local law enforcement at their homes for over 24 hours,” Schultz said. “They were in their homes hiding. … That’s a trauma that remains.”
Minnesota and 24 other states have now passed laws to allow campaign funds to be used to reimburse or cover the cost of camera and home security systems, most of them after the Minnesota shootings. Future Caucus itself offers a discounted membership to home and digital security services, as well as some in-person security services for special events.
“State lawmakers do not have the tools that Congress has in order to keep themselves safe, but it’s just as important,” Mack said. “Cameras only do so much to keep individuals safe. They’re oftentimes a way to check after the fact. … There still need to be more robust conversations about how we keep our physical statehouses protected.”
But hearing from these lawmakers themselves, it’s hard to shake the sense that these measures are all, to an extent, stopgaps when polarization and radical thinking, including around political violence, are growing more popular, acceptable, and widespread. The reaction to the last year of killings only underscored the threat: Charlie Kirk’s death inspired conspiracy theories on the right and cruel mockery on the left, while a US senator made light of the Minnesota shootings on social media and blithely stoked rumors about the motive.
According to Future Caucus’s own research, political violence egged on by hyperpartisan rhetoric is now a defining obstacle for both state legislators and those aspiring to hold public office.
“Combined with structural and cultural barriers, they threaten lawmakers’ ability to effectively serve their communities,” Reed Howard, Future Caucus’s chief strategy and public affairs officer, wrote in a 2025 report detailing reasons young legislators end up leaving public service altogether. “Even as many Future Caucus members view public office as temporary service rather than a long-term career, it is essential that they have a fair opportunity to be productive and impactful.”
They aren’t alone in these experiences. Some four in 10 state legislators, and one in five local officeholders, reported experiencing threats or attacks since 2020, according to a series of surveys completed in 2023 by the Brennan Center for Justice. Significant shares of state legislators reported then that the seriousness and rate of abuse and harassment they have received has increased in the time they’ve been in office.
Elected officials who reported more physical threats tended to be women and nonwhite, while Republicans tended to be more likely to say the severity of abuse has increased. And since the report, “swatting” — hoax calls to police departments to trigger a show of force at a home — have continued to be a constant threat: Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were both recent targets.
But the common thread is that lawmakers themselves are worried that more aggressive forms of rhetoric and politicking will become accepted as the new baseline even as more violent incidents occur. Particularly for younger legislators, who may lack a steady financial base, may be trying to start families, and may be trying to juggle other full-time jobs, these security concerns compound the challenge of public service.
“Especially with young people, they are seeing it way more firsthand than any other generation,” Fire Thunder said. “And that is having impacts in ways that we may not be seeing yet. It’s a fear tactic of: If you are running and you are standing up and being vocal on these issues, we are going to come after you.”
Fire Thunder’s most recent run-in with a serious potential threat happened not too long ago: A disgruntled citizen showed up at a public comment session her interim legislative committee was hosting, went on a conspiracy-laden rant, and threatened a trans legislator on the committee.
“We did not have security because it was not the actual committee hearing, but in a moment, I realized that this person could have had a weapon, could have had a gun, and just point-blank shot one of us in that room,” she told me.
As she embarks on her first full-term campaign this year, Fire Thunder told me her campaign is preparing not just to engage and rally her community, but also for inevitable threats to her life. Her campaign manager frequently reminds her, “What is our plan? What is our safety plan?” between events. She’s learning to live with that cloud, but she also worries what the country will lose if others decide it’s all too much to justify getting involved.
“The biggest negative impact of it isn’t even on me,” she said. “I don’t want other young people seeing the threats and things that I’m getting to discourage them.”
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