This paper posits a formal explanation for why electoral candidates in certain low-income countries distribute resources prior to the election, despite there being no guarantee that voters will respond to the transfers by voting in their favour. A multitude of empirical research shows that despite the existence of ballot secrecy laws, “money for votes” or electoral handouts is a strategy utilized in many developing polities despite the lack of contract enforcement. In order to reconcile this fact with the “commitment problem” of the contingent exchange implied in electoral clientelism, we show that pre-election transfers may be a signaling mechanism to indicate candidate strength in order to capture the vote, and that purchasing electoral support may be a more effective electoral strategy than programmatic competition for candidates in environments where perceived electoral viability is more important than ideological differences. In contrast to previous literature highlighting the prevalence of poor voters as the critical factor in vote-buying, the model identifies strategic voting in the informal sector as the mechanism by which pre-election handouts are effective in capturing votes.