Q&A: A New Ballot Initiative Aimed At Stopping Pay-to-Play Politics

"We’re sick of seeing wealthy benefactors override the will of Michiganders."

Organizers in Michigan are trying to stop oligarchs from running their state. This week, Taking Back Our Power, a coalition of Michigan-based groups, is launching a campaign for a 2026 ballot amendment that would restrict political contributions from utility companies, which are major donors and lobbyists, and large state contractors.

Voters Not Politicians — a nonpartisan organization that works for structural democracy reform and punches above its weight — is among those leading the fight. In 2018, Voters Not Politicians played a key leadership role in passing a ballot initiative that stopped partisan gerrymandering and guaranteed fair districts in Michigan. The group is hoping to pull off another major win on behalf of voters: They’re about to start gathering signatures to get this proposed amendment on the ballot.

I spoke with Voters Not Politicians’s Executive Director Christy McGillivray about how energy and tech titans are distorting our democracy and why putting guardrails on political spending is so important.

Meaghan: What are some of the primary ways you see political corruption affecting politics in your state?

Christy: Behind closed doors, every single person in Lansing will tell you that wildly popular bipartisan legislation will never see the light of day because the energy companies DTE and Consumers Energy don't want it to pass. Right now, it doesn’t matter if legislation will help people, it doesn’t matter if it’s bipartisan. If corporations are opposed to it, it won’t pass. We’ve seen it over and over again.

Last legislative session, we saw some really good environmental legislation that took on some of the biggest corporations in Michigan grind to a halt after elected officials who’d been campaigning on those issues their entire careers failed to deliver. And that was directly because of money in politics.

We’re sick of seeing wealthy benefactors override the will of Michiganders. So, a coalition of groups is supporting this ballot initiative that tackles the pay-to-play approach to money in politics.

We know that fighting corruption is wildly popular and bipartisan, and the only time we ever hit roadblocks is when we get sucked into these disinformation vortexes where people aren't agreeing on reality, right? When we have face-to-face conversations with people, when we get out of our social media silos that are driven by bot behavior, then we know that we all have these beliefs in common. In Michigan, we’ve shown that when voters really organize and go through the ballot process, we can make pretty profound changes.

Meaghan: Can you talk about the influence of tech money in particular?

Christy: The largest sector that donated to both political parties in the 2024 election was the crypto industry. Crypto poured money into candidates from all parties at every level of government, including the state government here in Michigan.

Last year, Michigan lawmakers passed a tax exemption for data centers. Data centers are the architecture and backbone of technology. You cannot have the internet or the cloud, you can't mine Bitcoin or have AI without data centers. We have about 50 data centers in Michigan, and AI and crypto are requiring this massive buildout of more of them. They’re these huge infrastructure projects that I don't think enough people are paying attention to, and they have very, very real consequences for regular people, because they use just massive, unheard of amounts of energy and water. And someone has to pay for that infrastructure. So, Michigan’s tax exemptions for data centers was a giveaway to Silicon Valley billionaires at the expense of public education.

But there's more. What these Silicon Valley oligarchs have been doing around the country is directly passing the costs for building their AI infrastructure onto regular electricity ratepayers, and people's bills are going through the roof to pay for the artificial intelligence that is currently wrecking our democracy and building a surveillance state. There’s this amazing reporting out from ProPublica about how this little, tiny sales and use tax exemption in Washington State was exploited by Microsoft and ballooned into the biggest corporate giveaway in the entire state's history.

Last year, Democrats in leadership in Michigan got together with the energy company DTE and Republicans and they whipped enough votes to override their own members to deliver a tax break to Silicon Valley billionaires that is going to raise everyone's bills on the heels of an election that was decided on affordability.

It is a political nightmare. It is a policy nightmare. It is going to hurt Michiganders. A tax break for Silicon Valley billionaires, that’s what lawmakers prioritized, even when there was massive grassroots opposition.

So, that’s when we realized, we have to take on money in politics. We have to use this more direct approach to democracy to get past the gatekeepers that are corrupting democracy. That’s why we’re doing the ballot initiative. We said, okay, let's close the loopholes. Let's make sure utility companies invest in renewable energy and have to be responsible with water. Let’s make sure they cannot jack up everyone's bills so Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg can have more tax breaks.

Meaghan: What can people do to support this ballot initiative?

We’re just starting to gather signatures to get the initiative on the 2026 ballot. We’ll need about 400,000 signatures. People can contribute to our ballot initiative committee, and in Michigan, we need volunteers. Every little bit counts.

We know we’re picking a very big fight. We know the business lobby is going to pour money into the state to try to stop us. Elon Musk tried to buy an election in Wisconsin, and it didn’t work. They’re going to try that here too, and we’re ready to fight. Every Michigander should join us, volunteer and join the fight, that’s what we really need. And I know it sounds crazy, but if anyone wants to come to Michigan and fight for democracy with us, we’d welcome them.

Meaghan: With so many terrible things happening, how are you coping?

Christy: I really like what Rebecca Solnit says about hope. You know, hope is not optimism. Optimism is the assumption that everything's going to work out. But hope is the core belief that what we do today will affect what happens tomorrow. And so, hope is the act of organizing and bringing people together to push back on abuses of power. That is democracy itself.

We are fighting for a better democratic system. We need this reform to pass. Regardless of what happens, this, what we’re doing right now, this is democracy.

They’re trying to stop people from talking to each other. They are trying to stop people from organizing. They are unveiling a surveillance state and a weaponized Department of Homeland Security to intimidate people into silence and to push us all back into our siloed, screen-mediated world. The fact that we are not doing that, the fact that we are doing democracy, regardless of whether anyone is giving us permission, to me, that’s a daily exercise in hope.