Why Money Shouldn't Buy Votes — In Your Community or Anywhere Else

March 20, 2026 · 7 min read

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine your neighborhood mutual aid group holds a vote on how to spend its emergency fund. One member just donated $5,000. Another member has been showing up every Saturday for two years, cooking meals, driving supplies, checking in on elders. Who should have more say in how that money gets spent?

In most groups today, the answer is obvious: whoever controls the money controls the decisions. And that's a problem that runs from your local Venmo account all the way up to national politics.

The Venmo Problem

During the 2020 mutual aid surge, thousands of groups formed almost overnight. People donated generously. But most of these groups funneled money through a single person's Venmo or CashApp. That person — usually whoever set up the account first — became the de facto treasurer, decision-maker, and gatekeeper.

Bed-Stuy Strong, a mutual aid network in Brooklyn, raised over $1.2 million in 2020. That money flowed through personal accounts. The volunteers who actually did the work — delivering groceries, translating for immigrant families, coordinating supply runs — had no formal say in how funds were allocated. Not because anyone was acting in bad faith, but because the tools they used made money and power inseparable.

This is what happens when you don't separate money from governance. The person who holds the wallet holds the power.

When Crypto Tried to Fix This (And Failed)

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations — DAOs — were supposed to solve this. Put the treasury on a blockchain, give everyone tokens, let them vote. Democracy for the digital age.

It didn't work. Because the governance tokens were tradeable on the open market, anyone with enough money could buy enough votes to control the treasury. It was plutocracy with extra steps.

In 2023, Aragon — one of the biggest DAO platforms — watched a group of activist investors buy up governance tokens on the open market, seize control of the treasury worth roughly $75 million, and vote to dissolve the project. The people who had built Aragon for years were outvoted by speculators who showed up with deep pockets and no commitment to the mission.

Nouns DAO saw a similar crisis when token holders organized a “rage quit” — a coordinated exit that drained roughly $27 million from the treasury. They didn't care about the community. They cared about extracting value. The system let them do it because money and votes were the same thing.

The Pattern Is Everywhere

This isn't just a crypto problem or a mutual aid problem. It's the defining pattern of modern governance failure. In American politics, the donor class effectively sets the policy agenda. A 2014 Princeton study found that the preferences of average citizens had “near-zero” impact on policy outcomes, while economic elites and organized business groups got what they wanted. Money bought votes — not directly, but through campaign financing, lobbying, and the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington.

In corporate governance, shareholders vote proportional to how many shares they own. One share, one vote. The largest institutional investors — BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street — effectively control the boards of most major corporations. Workers who spend their lives building these companies get zero say.

The pattern repeats at every scale: whoever has the most money gets the most influence. And it's destroying communities from the inside out.

What Happens When You Separate Money From Votes

The fix isn't complicated in principle: make money and governance power two separate things. You should be able to contribute to your community financially without automatically gaining control over it. And you should be able to earn governance power through commitment, participation, and trust — things that can't be bought on an open market.

This is exactly what Goodkeep does. Every community on Goodkeep has two layers: a transferable treasury token that works like money (you can send it, receive it, spend it) and a committed governance token that you earn by locking up your stake. The governance token can't be bought or sold. You get it by demonstrating commitment — putting skin in the game and keeping it there.

And even then, your voting power follows a square root curve. If you commit four times as much as someone else, you get two times the voting power — not four. This means no single member can dominate, no matter how much they stake. The system structurally prevents plutocracy.

What This Means for Your Community

Think about what this would have meant for Bed-Stuy Strong. Instead of one person's Venmo account holding all the power, every member who showed up and contributed would earn governance weight. The people doing the work — the ones driving supplies at 6 AM, the ones translating intake forms, the ones checking in on isolated neighbors — would have the most say in how the group operates.

A wealthy donor could still contribute generously to the treasury. That's encouraged. But their donation wouldn't buy them control. They'd have to actually commit — show up, participate, put their stake on the line — to earn governance power. And even then, the diminishing returns would prevent them from dominating.

This is how you build communities that last. Not by pretending money doesn't matter, but by making sure money and power aren't the same thing. The people who care the most should have the most say. But no one should be able to buy their way to the top.