Politics
Part of: Corporate InfluenceHow to Unf*ck America
By Rob C.
Art by Steve Sack
TL;DR: Democracy doesn’t only die in darkness—it dies when they close your polling place and ban mail-in-voting.
Americans like to brag about democracy. We love the word. We export it. We bomb people for it. We build billion-dollar monuments to it. But when it comes to actually participating in it—well, that’s where things start to fall apart. Voting is the cornerstone of democracy, but in modern America, it’s treated like an optional subscription service.
At its best, voting is how we—the people—get to choose who represents us in government. At its worst, it’s a rigged carnival game where the house always wins.
And guess who owns the carnival?
The Roberts Court’s Long War on Voting
If there’s a Mount Rushmore for the slow death of American democracy, Chief Justice John Roberts deserves a prime spot right next to Citizens United. For decades, Roberts has been on a personal crusade to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, the crown jewel of the civil rights movement—the very law that said, “Hey, maybe states with a history of racism shouldn’t be left alone to run elections unsupervised.”
In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Roberts and his conservative majority decided that racism was basically over—like a bad 90s sitcom that didn’t need another season. They gutted the VRA’s preclearance provision, which had required states with racist histories to get federal approval before changing voting laws. His reasoning? America had changed. We were post-racial now.
Within hours of that ruling, states like Texas, Alabama, and North Carolina began rolling out voter suppression laws faster than Amazon Prime deliveries. Coincidence? Please.
As Ari Berman details in Give Us the Ballot, Roberts’s decision wasn’t a blunder—it was the culmination of a decades-long campaign by conservatives to kneecap civil rights enforcement while pretending to protect “state sovereignty.” The result? A system where “one person, one vote” has quietly been replaced with “one billionaire, infinite influence.”
The Art of the Rig: Gerrymandering 101
If you can’t win fair and square, change the rules. That’s been the Republican strategy for years, and gerrymandering is their Picasso.
Take North Carolina, for example: a state that’s roughly half Republican and half Democrat. Yet, somehow, Republicans routinely win 10 of the state’s 14 congressional seats. It’s like flipping a coin ten times and getting heads every single time—if the coin were designed by the Federalist Society.
These maps aren’t drawn with pencils anymore—they’re engineered by data scientists and political operatives using algorithms that carve neighborhoods like Thanksgiving turkeys. The result? Democrats packed into a few overwhelmingly blue districts, while Republicans get a buffet of safe seats.
It’s not democracy—it’s district laundering.
And who’s controlling it from the shadows? The Council for National Policy (CNP)—the secretive coalition of billionaire funders, religious extremists, and right-wing power brokers pulling the GOP’s strings. Through dark-money outfits like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, they’ve built an entire ecosystem devoted to one goal: locking in minority rule under the banner of “freedom.”
The War on Voters
When even the maps aren’t crooked enough, the GOP brings out its other favorite weapons: voter suppression.
Here’s the playbook:
Voter ID laws—because if you can’t afford a driver’s license, clearly you don’t deserve a voice in your democracy.
Closing polling places—especially in Black, brown, and Democratic-leaning areas, because nothing says “freedom” like a six-hour wait in the rain.
Voter roll purges—because the easiest way to prevent fraud is to pretend that eligible voters don’t exist.
Mail-in voting restrictions—because the last thing Republicans want is for voting to be convenient.
And when even all that fails—when people still manage to show up and vote—there’s always the Supreme Court to swoop in and hand them the win. (See: Bush v. Gore, 2000. See also: Trump v. Reality, ongoing.)
Democracy for Sale
The sad truth is that the right to vote in America has become a privilege—one guarded by billionaires, judges, and corporate-funded politicians. The same forces that dismantled labor unions, privatized education, and flooded politics with dark money are now trying to privatize democracy itself.
And the Democratic Party, bless their trembling hearts, keeps thinking that reason and moral clarity will win this fight. Meanwhile, the other side is using religion, disinformation, and cold hard cash as weapons of mass disenfranchisement.
Voting isn’t just a right. It’s an act of rebellion.
It’s the only thing standing between “We the People” and “We the Profitable.”
If We Want to Unf*ck America... We Start Here.
We fix this by fighting for:
Automatic voter registration for every citizen.
Ranked Choice Voting Nationwide.
Nonpartisan redistricting commissions.
A constitutional right to vote.
The end of the Electoral College.
Because every time they close a polling place, purge a voter roll, or draw a map that erases a community, they’re not just suppressing votes—they’re suppressing hope.
And if history teaches us anything, it’s that once hope is gone, tyranny is right behind it.
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✍️ By Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet.