For people who think there's too much money in politics...

Barack Obama spent $513,557,218 to get 69,456,897 people to vote for him back in 2008. John McCain spent $346,666,422 to get 59,934,814 people to vote for him. (Source: Wikipedia.) I punched those four numbers into my calculator to find out how much the average vote cost in 2008. (I didn't include independent expenditures or votes, because we all know that those dollars and votes were wasted when they could have been put to much better use, like paying homeless people to occupy Wall Street.)

So it turns out that in 2008, your vote sold for... ready?

$6.6482129, or about $6.65.

I could buy a hamburger and a large fry for that. And that's what your vote is worth, apparently.

Now, I hesitate before I put a price tag on my vote, because someday someone might offer to pay me that much... or will pay someone else much less to forge my vote. But I will say that my vote is worth more than a hamburger and a large fry.

Hell, depending on where in the US you live, the minimum wage is between $7.25 and $9.04 (source: Wikipedia). So assuming you work, your vote is being bought for less than you make in an hour.

Here's the part where I get distracted and complain about how it takes me nearly an hour to pay for a lunch I can eat in five minutes, which always struck me as one of the strangest and most perverse things about the job I had last summer (the job paid more than minimum wage, but there wasn't a McDonald's in walking distance).

Here's the part where I get back on track, after quickly pausing and spell-checking and finding, to my considerable amusement, that the spell-checking program doesn't recognize "Wikipedia" as a word. I for one could stand to see a lot more money wasted during campaign season. I'm frankly insulted to think that my vote, my party-line-all-the-way-down-the-ballot-for-the-last-three-elections-running vote, is worth less than an hour's worth of work or a quarter-pounder and a large fry.

Come to think of that, the fact that your vote is worth less than an hour's worth of work means that no candidate ever has spent an hour of his life trying to get you to vote for him. And candidates generally don't work for minimum wage.