Make Them Pay More (By Voting).

It’s well-known that the wealthy and connected, the corporations and megadonors all spend big bucks on our elections, stifling our choices by flooding our airwaves. And the Supreme Court removed the meager governors that tried to keep the flooding down, they kicked out the sump-pumps, busted the levees, all that.

Make them pay more. Register to vote. And then vote. They will have to spend more for every vote against them.

Even before the racist Supreme Court ruling in Callais, gerrymandering was a problem. Donald John Trump ordered his party apparatchiks to gerrymander every state they could, and the little cretins in many states complied while the better repubs refused.

In the South, the maps are starting to resemble what they do in Communist–Authoritarian countries. One party, the communist–republicans, and you will have no choice. But you do still have a choice. You can make them spend pay more. By voting.

The corporations that have caused all the inflation, whether directly through price-hikes, or because they supported the election of MAGA-types who have allowed prices to soar from tariffs and war? You can make them pay more. Make the cost of buying our politicians go up. By voting.

I know what you want to know now: how much does my vote really cost them? A couple cents?

Your vote alone costs them almost nothing. But if you and everyone else who can vote, who wants something different than they’re giving you, if all of you vote, it costs them a lot. Your vote alone is like when you need to buy one washer but they’re sold by the gross or the case. You need that five-cent washer, but you have to buy ten dollars of washers.

But without your vote, it all stays cheap enough for them. They can write it off as a business expense. With your vote, they have two choices. Either they can pay more, try to squeeze more dumb votes out, or they can shift policies to actually appeal to you. The shift already happens when they’re backed into a corner. They back down on legislation sometimes, or like they’ve done in some places with data centers.

Paying more is harder. Once they reach most of the folks they’ll get with their basic spending, adding more costs even more. Say it’s a hundred bucks to reach 90% of their voters. Getting to 95% might take two hundred. Getting to 96% might take closer to three hundred. It takes more and more for less. So by voting, you can at least push them to have to pay more.

In America we’re supposed to have competition in elections. May the best candidate win, like that. In Communist–Authoritarian countries, they override any competition. In the American South, they override any competition by drawing districts so the Black vote won’t matter. And before, under the Voting Rights Act, the courts would stop them. They aren’t supposed to steal peoples’ votes, not in America. But after Callais, the court said it’s racist to have competition in the South. They say the South can be Communist–Authoritarian if they say they want to steal the election for their party.

But Black folks can make them pay more. By voting. We all can. And we all should. I will. Will you?