Polymarket Unveils Advanced Election Market Surveillance Ahead of U.S. Midterms

Monitoring across its U.S. and international platforms combines automated alerts with human-led searches for insider trading and election market manipulation

NEW YORK, Oct. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Ahead of the U.S. midterms, Polymarket today detailed election-specific surveillance designed to detect potential attempts to manipulate election markets, distort probabilities, or manufacture apparent market consensus.

As election market probabilities are increasingly cited alongside polls, attempts to create a misleading picture of a race can reach beyond the platform. Dedicated surveillance teams on Polymarket's U.S. and international platforms review potential misconduct under their respective rules and procedures.

"We build detections around how someone would actually try to manipulate an election market and what that activity would leave behind," said Shana Bautista, Head of Global Intelligence & Investigations at Polymarket. "Our team brings years of experience tracing funds and investigating sophisticated networks. We connect the evidence, evaluate legitimate explanations and document the basis for our decisions."

Polymarket's Global Intelligence & Investigations team supports the program with experience from the FBI, the U.S. Army, Coinbase, OKX, Chainalysis, and national security agencies. In their prior careers, these experts have investigated nation-state cyber operations, built insider-threat programs at major exchanges, and traced more than $4 billion in illicit cryptocurrency flows and supported investigations contributing to 119 federal indictments.

How the monitoring works

• Spotting potential misconduct: Election-specific detections target potential price manipulation, coordinated and inauthentic trading, insider trading and order-book abuse. Monitoring also covers access and eligibility violations and the integrity of sources used to resolve election markets.
• Connecting the evidence: Polymarket's dedicated market-integrity team uses PolyGraph, an internally developed system combining internal models, blockchain analytics, trade surveillance, open-source intelligence, and public reports. Public-blockchain transaction records and Polymarket's Chainalysis partnership support funding analysis and investigations.
• How alerts are assessed: Detection thresholds are recalculated from using each market's trading data. Investigators check alerts against multiple sources and consider legitimate explanations, including market-making, automated trading, and promotional activity.

Investigating potential Insider trading in election markets

Polymarket treats market manipulation in elections just like any other type of insider trading. Someone who sees results before the public, whether they work on a campaign or count ballots, has a duty to protect that information. If they trade on it, our job is to trace those trades back to them. Our monitoring activity focuses on points in a race when results may be known to a small group and when they become public.

Polymarket's investigators examine trading activity, account and funding links, on-chain records and open-source intelligence to assess potential misuse of confidential information. The team also searches historical trading data across both platforms for activity existing detections may miss, using its findings to develop new detections and improve monitoring.

Dedicated teams across both platforms

Polymarket U.S., a CFTC-designated contract market operated by QCX LLC, maintains its own Trade Surveillance team under the exchange's Chief Compliance Officer. Its election detections draw on verified customer identities, dollar funding links and order-book data, with surveillance and determinations governed by its published rulebook.

Global Intelligence & Investigations supports both platforms with detections, provides threat intelligence and sets a common review standard across both platforms. Each platform's surveillance team remains accountable for its own operations and decisions.

Substantiated violations may result in restrictions, disciplinary or legal action, or referral to regulators and law enforcement, as applicable. Public reports to [email protected] enter the international platform's investigative queue.

Information about Polymarket US's program is available at integrity.polymarket.us.

About Polymarket
Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform, where participants trade on the outcomes of real-world events. By harnessing the wisdom of the crowd and the efficiency of markets, Polymarket generates real-time probability estimates that have proven to be among the most accurate forecasting tools available. Polymarket's markets span global politics, economics, science, technology, sports, culture, and more, attracting hundreds of thousands of participants worldwide. Polymarket US operates as a CFTC-regulated designated contract market under the Commodity Exchange Act. For more information, visit polymarket.com.

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SOURCE Polymarket