What if you could buy elections through family gold instead of regions?
By that I mean that when the election is run, you could pay gold for a chance to simply decide what the results will be. The outcome would be one of:
-You fail, nothing happens
-You fail, you get caught, the realm is aware (maybe you get thrown in jail)
-You succeed, the election runs its course but instead of displaying the counted votes it shows whatever you want it to show. The realm is unaware anything happened.
This wouldn't work for appointed posts, of course, but that's fine. On the other hand, you could buy a government position if you were so inclined. And in most cases it would be seen as legitimate. There are cases where it won't be seen as legitimate because it flies in the face of everything the characters expected, but this will be an IC indignation and not meta-gaming.
Mechanically, I think it could work like this, although many details could be modified maintaining the core idea:
-When an election of any kind (including referendums) occurs and you go to the voting, you sometimes get a link to "Influence the results...". This link should only appear if you have over a certain prestige (15?).
-If you click it, you get a boilerplate warning. Then you get to write down what you would like the result to be. This probably requires some interface where you assign number of votes. I think you should be able to decide the votes, not just the winner.
-It costs you 6 hours
-It costs you an amount of gold that depends on the size of the realm (10 gold/noble?). It should be easy to rig the vote in a two region realm where the vote counter is your cousin Billie Joe, it should hard in a 100k+ people realm with multiple cities.
-As a refinement, it could be paid by family gold.
-If you get caught, you get caught immediately.
-If you don't get caught, the votes goes on. You're still not certain if you will succeed.
-The probability to get caught should be fixed; I would say 20% caught - 40% fail without getting caught - 40% succeed.
-I can't see any skill it should be tied to, but in theory it could.
-When the vote terminates, either the results you've decided or the actual result, depending on your success, appears. Everyone just sees the result as normal.
-If multiple people try to rig the election, the successful one (if any) should be randomly chosen and race conditions avoided.
I think that's it!
