Your vote won’t count for (coffee) beans
Kim notes below that several businesses are offering free food and drink to people who vote tomorrow. All in good fun, right? Not so fast. Officials warn that offering any kind of compensation for voting violates election law, even if the companies don’t care who in particular customers vote for. To stay on the right side of the law, Starbucks and Ben and Jerry’s are now offering freebies to everybody:
Starbucks Corp., the world’s largest chain of coffee shops, may violate federal election laws if it follows through with a promise to give free coffee tomorrow to those who vote.
Election officials in the state of Washington told the Seattle-based coffee chain that federal law prohibits payment of money, goods or services in return for voting, said David Ammons, spokesman for the Washington secretary of state.
“Federal law makes no distinction between cups of coffee or a raffle ticket versus a buy-the-vote kind of thing on the other end of the spectrum,” Ammons said today in an interview. “We just told Starbucks, essentially, no good deed goes unpunished. We appreciate the gesture, but it’s forbidden.”
The good news is you no longer have to weigh the benefits of free coffee and ice cream against the shame of supporting any of the bastards on the ballot. Now you can get free coffee instead of voting.
If by chance you are thinking about voting tomorrow, here’s a shameless plug for my evaluation of the candidates and here’s Will Wilkinson on the virtues of abstaining.
