How Politcians buy and sell votes in America without breaking the law

By Josiah James Ingalls I cannot sell my vote directly, it’s a crime. The candidates can buy your vote and it’s legal, as long as they don’t pay you directly. I know, I ran for public office. Chances are if you are an American and you voted, your vote was bought, only you did not get paid for it directly, and most of you never knew that money changed hands in exchange for your vote. Regardless of political affiliation chances are a candidate, if not all the candidates, from your political party has engaged in indirect purchasing of votes. I’m sure by now you are sitting on the edge of your seat, just dying to know about the biggest secret in American politics, how they buy your vote and get away with it every election.It actually comes down to the psychology of the vote in two areas. First is the psychology of the voter who is part of an organization or a special interest group, which has its own separate status as a legally recognized entity with its own separate bank accounts, separate from the governing body and members of that organization. First we will discuss this section which leads to the next level of the psychology of the vote, and that is the psychology of the average voter when they go into the voting booth to cast their ballot. In order to make it understandable for everyone how I stumbled across this rather huge, most dirty secret of American politics, we have to backtrack a couple of years, but I will keep the part about me brief in order to be able to stay on the subject as much as possible,because this paper is not about me, it’s about educating the public, because with knowledge comes power, and I’m hoping to give you the power to never allow your vote to be bought again. That is the goal of this paper. In 2009 I ran for public office for the first time, knowing very little about how the political system actually worked. I threw myself into a race for Mayor of Austin and got acrash course in politics. Later I would run for public office several more times, the State Board of Education, then City Council Place One, and then City Council Place Seven. I did not finish the race for the City Council Place Seven, even though I started the process,but the previous times I ran for office I was in the race from start to finish. It was in my third race for public office that I began to really put everything that I had seen and heard on the campaign trail together in such a way that I had an enlightenment moment of how the candidates that were winning were buying votes indirectly. I discovered that it is a self reinforcing loop. First, the candidates buy the vote of organizations and political parties, which then in turn, buy your vote. Most candidates donate money to major organizations in the communities of the district in which they are running for an office. The organizations that get the money are in two categories, large politically connected organizations that don’t give endorsements, then all politically involved organizations that do give endorsements. These two categories are where money begins to change hands. First, the candidates know they want to run for public office in advance, so a year to six months on average before the campaign even begins, the candidates start to donate large amounts of money to these groups. The larger the group and the more political influence it has, or the more political pull their endorsement has, will receive larger sums of money in donations. The smaller organizations will receive smaller amounts. It is also common for the candidate to pay to be a member of a good amount of these organizations. If these organizations have memberships in which they are eligible to be a member, the candidates know more than most how the psychology of all of this works. People want to support someone whom they feel supports them and what better way to guarantee they know you support them than for the candidate to give them money or to be a member of their organization, because a candidate who has donated money or has been a member, or is a member, of a politically involved organization, especially those that give endorsements, are far more likely to receive the endorsements of those organizations. These endorsements make a candidate appear to be electable and appear tobe supported, but in most cases they got supported because they were the candidate that financially supported that organization. So now the candidates have put money in these private organization’s bank accounts and have effectively bought the votes of these private organizations, therefore buying their endorsements because they’re taking advantage of the psychology of “we will support whoever supports us.” This is a major area in which candidates prey upon the population of their districts. Now once a candidate has bought as many endorsements that they could buy in the support of as many organizations they could buy, these organizations reach out to their members and tell them we are supporting this candidate, you should consider voting for them, and usually these emails or letters also include information about their past affiliations with these candidates and what those candidates have done for them like donate money, or be in a paid member before, or still is a paid member, in order to persuade their general membership to vote for these candidates and to donate money and time to these candidates, which all the more helps the candidates seem supported by raising more money through these organizations and their members. This gives them the political capital they need when it comes to the vote of the general population. Now if you are not a member of a special interest group or one of the organizations that are structured in such a way that I’ve talked about already, then this is where your vote is bought and paid for months, even years before you even cast your vote, because of the fact that the candidate does all of this prep work in order to ultimately buy the vote of the population, because the candidate knows that the general person, when they step into the voting booth, the general person wants to walk away withtwo things. They want to feel that their time was worth it to vote. The general person also wants to feel that their vote was worth casting, and because of the psychology of these two things, the general population on average will vote for someone who has raised significant amounts of money and has gotten the endorsement of significant amounts of organizations that give endorsements to candidates for that district in order to ensure that they feel like they voted for someone who had a chance to win, so that they don’t feel their time and their vote was wasted. Because you, the general person, let these two subconscious things primarily decide who you’re going to vote for, you became a victim of the buy and sell votes in America’s Ponzi scheme. What I learned in running for office all those times was no matter how likely a candidate is to win or lose, that should not be a factor in my decision of who to vote for when I go into the voting booth to cast my ballot. I vote simply according to my conscience and not on who is most likely to win or who has the most support, because if I vote that way I have allowed my vote to be bought because the system relies on you to factor that into your decision-making in order for this system of buying and selling votes in America to be a self fulfilling loop. So in removing those two things from the factors of how I make my decision I no longer allow my vote to be bought by the system, when endorsements mean nothing to me as an individual. When it comes to casting my vote I have broken the cycle. When the amount of money that a candidate has raised or did not raise has no bearing on my vote for that candidate I have again broken the cycle, and by breaking this self-fulfilling cycle of indirect purchase of votes I give myself the power to never be bought by special interest. If you are reading this and are asking yourself why does the special interest always get represented, and why do candidates always represent the special interests, you now know why the system is what it is, and why it is corrupted how it is corrupted, and with this knowledge you have the power to stop it by changing how you make your decision to vote. Next time you go in that voting booth to cast your ballot remember this article, remember how they buy your vote. You can make a difference by how you make your choice. You have the power to change the world one vote at a time. If you want your vote to matter and you want your time to be worth it, it will be worth it, and it will matter if you vote on your conscience instead of the traditional do they have a chance of winning and do I agree with them. I’m breaking the cycle and exposing the dirty secret to the world. Share this knowledge and you can do the same. ©By Josiah James Ingalls