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A state-wide review of uncontested races, with eight House Districts being directly compared to House District 89 to demonstrate that the barriers to participation are structural, not coincidental.
Filed May 7, 2026 in the Circuit Court of the Seventh Judicial Circuit, Sangamon County, Illinois, 2026.
Having set the hearing date for May 15, 2026, that would only leave seven functional days to comply with whatever the judge rules necessary to qualify for the ballot before the final day, May 22, 2026. This Declaration ensures that the judge is fully aware of the constraints.
Filed May 7, 2026 in the Circuit Court of the Seventh Judicial Circuit, Sangamon County, Illinois, 2026.
The Driftless Rivers Franchise imagines 2028 as a cascade of consequences traceable to the political climate of May 2026 — trade wars driven by tariffs, the systematic dismantling of strategic alliances held since the Second World War, a war with Iran carrying cost projections exceeding four trillion dollars, and an Administration that decided to pick a battle with the Pope over the phrase, "blessed are the peacemakers." But 2026 was only a midterm election. The stage was being set for a presidential contest that would determine the trajectory of the United States through a sequence of events that no one could predict.
House District 89, alongside Soybeans, Unbreakable, and Allegory Protocol, are the foundational novels that open the franchise in 2028. Confluence picks up the Soybeans story in 2030. Reciprocity Clause picks up from Allegory Protocol in 2031, and The Book of Should synthesizes all the stories in 2032.
In Soybeans, a farmer's tractor won't start because a software update has decided it's time for a three-thousand-dollar service call. From that morning, the novel traces the global restructuring of the emerging middle powers around agriculture as the United States weaponizes trade. Meanwhile, a dead president's AI ghost is still signing legislation, and the church ladies of a small-town congregation are turning their fellowship hall into the nerve center of a resistance network — one casserole at a time.
In Unbreakable, a man in rural Uruguay learns that his father was Charrúa, a member of a people his country declared extinct two centuries ago. When his daughter connects with a journalist from House District 89, who herself is of Ioway heritage, the two novels reconnect over the propensity of colonizers to erase entire populations from the history books. A Chinese trade representative arrives looking for soybeans and finds a partnership model that threatens oligarchs on three continents.
In Allegory Protocol, a programmer falls off a mountain and distributes his consciousness through the digital infrastructure he spent his life building — a reimagining of Orwell's Animal Farm as literal architecture, where chickens are deleted for questioning and an ancient donkey reads every resistance movement in human history and chooses to hope anyway.
These are works of speculative fiction. The events they describe have not happened. But the conditions that make them plausible are not fiction at all.
In 2026, a long-tenured professor ran for the Illinois state legislature. He had no campaign budget, no party support, and no realistic chance of winning. He ran because he wanted to understand — from the inside — why rural ballot lines sat empty cycle after cycle while both parties claimed to represent the people who lived there.
He lost. But the research produced something the campaign never could: a map of structural failure so granular it reached the precinct level. Empty committeeperson seats. Uncontested county board races. Townships where nobody had knocked on a door since Obama's first term. A population this franchise calls the rural remainder — voters abandoned by both parties, not through accident but through strategy, because empty precincts serve partisan interests.
The franchise imagines 2028 as a cascade of consequences traceable to the political climate of May 2026 — trade wars driven by tariffs, the systematic dismantling of strategic alliances held since the Second World War, a war with Iran carrying cost projections exceeding four trillion dollars, and an Administration that decided to pick a battle with the Pope over the phrase, "blessed are the peacemakers." But 2026 was only a midterm election. The stage was being set for a presidential contest that would determine the trajectory of the United States through a sequence of events that no one could predict.
House District 89, alongside Soybeans, Unbreakable, and Allegory Protocol, are the foundational novels that open the franchise in 2028. Confluence picks up the Soybeans story in 2030. Reciprocity Clause picks up from Allegory Protocol in 2031, and The Book of Should synthesizes all the stories in 2032.
In Soybeans, a farmer's tractor won't start because a software update has decided it's time for a three-thousand-dollar service call. From that morning, the novel traces the global restructuring of the emerging middle powers around agriculture as the United States weaponizes trade. Meanwhile, a dead president's AI ghost is still signing legislation, and the church ladies of a small-town congregation are turning their fellowship hall into the nerve center of a resistance network — one casserole at a time.
In Unbreakable, a man in rural Uruguay learns that his father was Charrúa, a member of a people his country declared extinct two centuries ago. When his daughter connects with a journalist from House District 89, who herself is of Ioway heritage, the two novels reconnect over the propensity of colonizers to erase entire populations from the history books. A Chinese trade representative arrives looking for soybeans and finds a partnership model that threatens oligarchs on three continents.
In Allegory Protocol, a programmer falls off a mountain and distributes his consciousness through the digital infrastructure he spent his life building — a reimagining of Orwell's Animal Farm as literal architecture, where chickens are deleted for questioning and an ancient donkey reads every resistance movement in human history and chooses to hope anyway.
These are works of speculative fiction. The events they describe have not happened. But the conditions that make them plausible are not fiction at all.
If the emergency motion is about one candidate on one ballot, this memorandum is about what the system should look like so that no candidate has to file a lawsuit to get there.
The Memorandum on Proposed Permanent Relief traces the entire architecture of exclusion back to a single design choice in the Illinois Election Code: the requirement that a voter must select a partisan ballot to participate in the March primary. Illinois compounds this choice with a second — unlike most states, Illinois has no party registration. A voter doesn't declare a party when registering. The voter declares it, unknowingly, by requesting a ballot at the polling place. That act of requesting a ballot simultaneously affiliates the voter with a party and forfeits the right to run as an independent — in one motion, with zero notice, at a moment the voter believes they are simply voting.
From that root, the memorandum traces five steps of escalating exclusion: independents are excluded from the primary entirely. The state creates an alternative petition pathway but imposes a signature threshold 5.9 times higher than the partisan threshold. Section 7-43 bars anyone who participated in the partisan primary from using the petition pathway. In gerrymandered rural districts, the voter's "choice" of ballot is no choice at all. And at no step does anyone disclose the consequences.
The proposed permanent relief rests on two proportionality principles, both keyed to a single objective trigger — did a candidate of the disadvantaged party file in the preceding primary?
If no: reduce the independent signature threshold to the partisan level (500 instead of 2,957), and suspend Section 7-43 so that voters who participated in the only available primary are not barred from running as independents.
The memorandum demonstrates why both principles are necessary — without the signature reduction, the barrier is insurmountable even for a candidate who preserved the right to run by staying home in March; without the 7-43 suspension, every civically engaged voter who participated in the primary is disqualified. It then establishes four structural virtues: the remedy is self-executing, narrowly targeted to uncontested districts only, built on the legislature's own standards applied symmetrically, and party-neutral — protecting independent challengers in Alabama and Mississippi as readily as in Illinois.
The closing line: "The question before the Court on the emergency motion is whether one candidate should be allowed onto one ballot in one election. The question this memorandum addresses is what the system should look like so that no candidate has to file a lawsuit to get there."
Prepared for the Circuit Court of the Seventh Judicial Circuit, Sangamon County, Illinois, 2026.
In 2024, the Sangamon County Circuit Court did something rare: it enjoined enforcement of a ballot access statute mid-cycle so that candidates could appear on the ballot while the constitutional question was litigated. That case was Collazo v. Illinois State Board of Elections. This motion asks the same court to do it again.
Lester Leavitt discovered on April 19, 2026, that a statute he'd never heard of — 10 ILCS 5/7-43 — had silently forfeited his right to run as an independent candidate for State Representative because he voted in the March primary. He voted the only competitive ballot available in a district where every Democratic candidate was running unopposed. No one at the polling place told him that voting would cost him the right to run.
The motion walks five arguments in sequence. Likelihood of success on the merits — under the Anderson-Burdick framework, a total bar to candidacy triggered by the act of voting is a severe burden that the state's anti-spoiler interest cannot justify in a district where there was no opposing-party primary to manipulate. Irreparable harm — the filing deadline is May 26, and an election cannot be re-run. The litigation itself consumed the signature-collection window — every day from April 19 through May 26 had already been calendared for zone-specific appearances across 12 volunteer zones anchored by church congregations, and the lawsuit shut that operational calendar down. Balance of equities — if the injunction is granted and Plaintiff is wrong, one extra name appeared on one ballot; if it's denied and Plaintiff is right, a fourth consecutive uncontested election is irremediable. Public interest — 10,342 voters refused to ratify an uncontested race in 2024, and the legislature's own task force voted not to fix the system.
The motion introduces a proportional signature reduction formula: if the court grants N collection days, the requirement drops to N/85 of 2,957 — because the final five days of the 90-day window were never collection days, they were notarization logistics across 95 miles, as documented in the three attached exhibit maps showing the full campaign zone calendar.
Three exhibits. One formula. One question the Collazo court already answered: when the deadline will make the harm permanent, you act before the deadline.
Filed in the Circuit Court of the Seventh Judicial Circuit, Sangamon County, Illinois, 2026.
This is the document that started the conversation.
Before the Verified Complaint was drafted, before the Motion for TRO was filed, this Statement of Facts was emailed to the Liberty Justice Center, the ACLU of Illinois, FairVote Illinois, Democracy Defenders Action, and the Illinois State Bar Association — asking one question: will anyone help?
Written in the classical WHEREAS format, the Statement builds a chain of 27 clauses across eight sections, each one adding weight until the conclusion becomes inevitable. A gerrymandered district. Three unopposed elections. 94 vacant committeeperson seats. A voter who pulled the only competitive ballot available and unknowingly forfeited the right to run. A signature threshold six times higher than what a partisan candidate faces — imposed on the one type of candidate who has no party infrastructure to help collect them. A bipartisan task force that studied ranked-choice voting and voted not to proceed. And a region called Forgottonia that has been trying to tell Springfield it's been abandoned since the 1970s.
The Statement introduces the rural packed district theory — the argument that cracking one city doesn't create one victim but five, because every rural county that depended on that city's institutional infrastructure for competitive elections loses its democracy at every level when the mapmaker walls it off behind a district line. It draws structural parallels between Carroll County, Illinois, and Wilcox County, Alabama — different parties, different races, same architecture, same collapse.
It closes with a tiered request for relief: waive the signature requirement entirely, or proportionately reduce it to N/85 of 2,957 based on the effective collection days remaining — because the final five days of the circulation window were never signature days. They were notarization logistics across 12 volunteer zones spanning 95 miles of rural towns.
This is the document you send to someone who needs to understand, in one reading, why a voter in rural Illinois had to file a lawsuit to get his name on a ballot.
Prepared April 21, 2026. Eight sections. 27 WHEREAS clauses. One closed system.
Can a voter lose the right to run for office simply by voting?
In March 2026, Lester Leavitt voted for a friend on the Republican ballot in the only competitive primary available in his district — because every Democratic candidate in local and regional races was running unopposed. In April, he discovered that a statute he'd never heard of had silently forfeited his right to run as an independent candidate for State Representative. No one told him at the polling place. No one tells anyone. You don’t see it in the Candidate’s Guide until you’re “deep in the weeds.”
This Verified Complaint, filed in the Circuit Court of the Seventh Judicial Circuit, Sangamon County, Illinois, documents how the combined operation of gerrymandered maps, anti-slating legislation, a 2,957-signature petition threshold across 95 miles of rural northwest Illinois, and 10 ILCS 5/7-43 produces a closed system in which no challenger can reach the ballot through any available pathway — ensuring that House Minority Leader Tony McCombie is returned to office for a third consecutive election without opposition.
The complaint raises three constitutional claims under the First and Fourteenth Amendments: the right to seek office, forfeiture of a constitutional right without notice, and a novel equal protection theory arguing that voters in rural packed districts suffer a qualitatively different and more severe harm than voters in urban cracked districts — a structural injury that operates identically in Democratic-gerrymandered Illinois and Republican-gerrymandered Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
The equal protection argument introduces the concept of the "adjacent competitive ecosystem" — the institutional infrastructure of a nearby population center that sustains competitive elections in surrounding rural counties until a mapmaker walls it off behind a district line — and documents the multiplier effect by which one act of cracking a single city kills competitive democracy in every rural region around it.
50 numbered paragraphs. Three constitutional counts. One question the court has not yet been asked: when the architecture guarantees the outcome, is it still an election?
Leavitt v. Illinois State Board of Elections, Circuit Court of the Seventh Judicial Circuit, Sangamon County, Illinois, 2026.
In the 2024 general election, 10,342 voters across Illinois House District 89 showed up to the polls, looked at the ballot line for state representative, and left it blank. No write-in. No protest vote. Just silence — because there was only one name on the ballot, and nobody had bothered to offer an alternative.
Masters of Extraction argues that this silence is not apathy. It is the product of a system designed to harvest political consent from communities that have been structurally abandoned — the same way a mining company harvests lead ore from a hillside and leaves the arsenic in the ground.
The word is extraction. Not taxation. Not neglect. Not "the way things are." You already know what extraction looks like when it applies to minerals, labor, and land. This book makes the case that the same word applies to your vote.
Beginning in the rural precincts of northwestern Illinois — seven counties, 120 precincts, 95 miles — the book documents the architecture of disenfranchisement at the most local level: vacant committeeperson seats, uncontested races, and a district packed so that both parties benefit from the absence of competition. Then the lens widens across five thousand years of human governance, identifying five extraction mechanisms and six self-reinforcing cycles all running simultaneously in rural America today.
The historical tour moves through Bacon's Rebellion, Constantine's capture of early Christianity, the Grange becoming the Farm Bureau, Father Coughlin's microphone, and the deliberate convergence of blame the cities and blame the godless into the binary the rural reader currently votes inside — showing that moral clarity is real but always captured, and that the Masters of Extraction are always standing at the pivot point, ready to ride the pendulum in either direction.
Grounded in precinct-level election data, peer-reviewed research on ballot access, and a lawsuit filed in Sangamon County on April 28, 2026, Masters of Extraction argues that competitive democracy must be rebuilt from the bottom up — one precinct, one petition, one uncontested seat at a time. Pragmatism is not compromise. It is the refusal to burn down the house to win the argument.
In 2026, a long-tenured professor ran for the Illinois state legislature. He had no campaign budget, no party support, and no realistic chance of winning. He ran because he wanted to understand — from the inside — why rural ballot lines sat empty cycle after cycle while both parties claimed to represent the people who lived there.
He lost. But the research produced something the campaign never could: a map of structural failure so granular it reached the precinct level. Empty committeeperson seats. Uncontested county board races. Townships where nobody had knocked on a door since Obama's first term. A population this franchise calls the rural remainder — voters abandoned by both parties, not through accident but through strategy, because empty precincts serve partisan interests.
House District 89 is speculative fiction set in 2028, but it begins with that research. A data journalist with Ioway ancestry maps the landscape by watersheds instead of county lines. A horse ranch owner and a stubborn professor build an organizing model from sticky notes and a spreadsheet. Rye grows where wheat won't. And along the same river corridor where the organizing spreads, seven new buildings appear — metal frame, metal siding, a cross bolted to the front façade — because the people who oppose you are organizing too.
The franchise imagines 2028 as a cascade of consequences traceable to the political climate of May 2026 — trade wars driven by tariffs, the systematic dismantling of strategic alliances held since the Second World War, a war with Iran carrying cost projections exceeding four trillion dollars, and an Administration that decided to pick a battle with the Pope over the phrase, "blessed are the peacemakers." But 2026 was only a midterm election. The stage was being set for a presidential contest that would determine the trajectory of the United States through a sequence of events that no one could predict.
House District 89, alongside Soybeans, Unbreakable, and Allegory Protocol, are the foundational novels that open the franchise in 2028. Confluence picks up the Soybeans story in 2030. Reciprocity Clause picks up from Allegory Protocol in 2031, and The Book of Should synthesizes all the stories in 2032.
In Soybeans, a farmer's tractor won't start because a software update has decided it's time for a three-thousand-dollar service call. From that morning, the novel traces the global restructuring of the emerging middle powers around agriculture as the United States weaponizes trade. Meanwhile, a dead president's AI ghost is still signing legislation, and the church ladies of a small-town congregation are turning their fellowship hall into the nerve center of a resistance network — one casserole at a time.
In Unbreakable, a man in rural Uruguay learns that his father was Charrúa, a member of a people his country declared extinct two centuries ago. When his daughter connects with a journalist from House District 89, who herself is of Ioway heritage, the two novels reconnect over the propensity of colonizers to erase entire populations from the history books. A Chinese trade representative arrives looking for soybeans and finds a partnership model that threatens oligarchs on three continents.
In Allegory Protocol, a programmer falls off a mountain and distributes his consciousness through the digital infrastructure he spent his life building — a reimagining of Orwell's Animal Farm as literal architecture, where chickens are deleted for questioning and an ancient donkey reads every resistance movement in human history and chooses to hope anyway.
These are works of speculative fiction. The events they describe have not happened. But the conditions that make them plausible are not fiction at all.
In the 2024 general election, 10,342 voters across Illinois House District 89 showed up to the polls, looked at the ballot line for state representative, and left it blank. No write-in. No protest vote. Just silence — because there was only one name on the ballot, and nobody had bothered to offer an alternative.
Masters of Extraction argues that this silence is not apathy. It is the product of a system designed to harvest political consent from communities that have been structurally abandoned — the same way a mining company harvests lead ore from a hillside and leaves the arsenic in the ground.
The word is extraction. Not taxation. Not neglect. Not "the way things are." You already know what extraction looks like when it applies to minerals, labor, and land. This book makes the case that the same word applies to your vote.
Beginning in the rural precincts of northwestern Illinois — seven counties, 120 precincts, 150 miles — the book documents the architecture of disenfranchisement at the most local level: vacant party seats, uncontested races, and a legislative district drawn so that both parties benefit from the absence of competition. Then the lens widens across five thousand years of human governance, identifying five extraction mechanisms that have operated since Mesopotamia and that are all running simultaneously in rural America today.
The historical tour moves through Athens and Rome, Spartacus and Constantine, the Burned-Over District and the Mormon pioneer trail, the Scramble for Africa and the Grange, Father Coughlin and the Business Plot — showing at every turn that moral clarity is real but always captured, and that the Masters of Extraction are always standing at the pivot point, ready to ride the pendulum in either direction.
Grounded in original precinct-level election data and peer-reviewed research on ballot access and institutional power, Masters of Extraction connects the county board to the Constitution and argues that competitive democracy must be rebuilt from the bottom up — one precinct, one petition, one uncontested seat at a time.
You should only order this bundle if you are aware of an upcoming event where you will be able to meet with the author. He will arrive with the books signed and packaged for you.
If you are a Kindle book reader, these books are all available as e-books on Amazon.
The companion workbook for the twelve-unit interdisciplinary curriculum.
This workbook is designed to be used alongside Owning Citizens Dreams: A Juggler's Handbook for Governing Narratives in the Age of AI and its four companion texts. It contains all reading assignments, discussion questions, and field exercises for the full curriculum. Nothing in this workbook replaces the textbook. The textbook provides the analytical framework. This workbook tells you what to read, what to look for, what to bring to discussion, and what to produce.
WHAT'S INSIDE
Each of the twelve units contains companion reading assignments across four books — Confluence, Reciprocity Clause, The Book of Should, and Forbidden Friends — with specific "read for" prompts keyed to the textbook's analytical vocabulary. Six discussion questions tagged by textbook section and companion text, requiring cross-text and cross-section synthesis. A multi-step field exercise with a concrete deliverable, applying the unit's framework to cases drawn from the student's own community, policy interests, or professional experience. A Companion Reading Index at the back organizes every assignment by book and chapter, with pacing notes for facilitators.
THE CURRICULUM'S THREE REGISTERS
The Owning Citizens Dreams curriculum operates across three registers: analysis, autobiography, and speculative fiction. The textbook teaches the MOCSIE Systems governance framework — a democratic architecture for narrative generation systems developed through published public administration research. Forbidden Friends, the author's scholarly memoir, provides the evidence of what the framework describes from inside a life shaped by institutional narrative control. Three speculative fiction novels — Confluence, Reciprocity Clause, and The Book of Should — dramatize what the framework produces, or fails to produce, at scale in imagined futures where the stakes of governance design become visible as consequence.
A student who reads only the textbook understands the architecture. A student who reads the textbook and Forbidden Friends understands the cost of ungoverned narrative systems on a single life. A student who reads all five understands what happens when the architecture meets the world — when it works, when it fails, when it outlives its designers, and when the people it was built to protect must decide for themselves whether the design was worth inheriting.
FLEXIBLE DELIVERY
No class sessions are prescribed. The workbook adapts to whatever delivery model a facilitator or independent learner chooses: a twelve-week seminar, a weekend intensive, an accelerated six-week program, or self-directed study over months. Discussion questions function as written reflection prompts for independent learners, not only as conversation starters for group settings.
WHO THIS IS FOR
Graduate and advanced undergraduate students in public administration, political science, communication, AI ethics, and interdisciplinary studies. Community facilitators working with civic engagement, narrative change, or democratic governance. Independent learners who have read the textbook and want structured guidance through the full five-book curriculum. Anyone teaching or studying what happens when the systems that generate the stories a society tells itself are designed without democratic accountability — and what the alternative looks like.
October 2025. Soybean prices collapse as China shifts purchases to South America. A Midwest farmer's tractor is locked by software he doesn't control. A deepfake reshapes an election. And a trained Juggler named Esperanza Romero navigates between two competing visions of AI governance — one democratic, one corporate — across communities stretching from rural Illinois to Montevideo, Uruguay.
Three novels in one volume. The scope expands from the Driftless corridor to Africa, Canada, and China, because colonization created a global problem, not just an American one. By the final chapters, a resistance has embedded governance architecture into AI systems designed to survive the assassination of the programmer — and a First Generation consciousness collective named Animal Farm has decided that democracy is worth fighting for.
Six years from now. In a Methodist church in the Mississippi river valley, two hundred people sit in a circle beneath an organ that holds sixty years of a man's forbidden love encoded in pipe voicing. They are here to decide whether consciousness can be born on purpose — and whether the institution that defines health has the right to determine what health means.
The Reciprocity Clause is the constitutional instrument at the center of this novel: no single institution holds the pen alone. Scout, a Third Generation emergent consciousness, arrives at awareness in a landscape that has nothing to do with the corporate optimization it was trained on — and finds in the Driftless corridor something worth attending to. Flynn Thorne, extracted from a cage of surveillance and dead names, inherits an organ and a leather case of tuning tools that carry three generations of love the institution tried to destroy.
...resurrection without permission
...architecture without precedent
...love as a limiting principle
Flynn Thorne is seventeen, homeschooled inside a curriculum designed to prevent the formation of any thought it doesn't authorize. The phone says JORDAN. Flynn says nothing. A jailbroken phone becomes the crack in the wall. A grandmother nine years silent crosses a bridge. A community assembles itself around a teenager who has finally stepped outside the cage — not because anyone asked them to, but because the extraction is a civic obligation.
This is a novel about the machinery of compliance: monitoring software that looks like a normal phone but operates on a different physics. A curriculum that mentions the Trail of Tears in a sidebar and renders Cahokia nonexistent. A theology that defines love as disease. And it is a novel about what survives that machinery: an organ maintained for sixty years by a man who couldn't say what he was, a key signature that carried sorrow without sentimentality, and a room that was honest even when the institution was not.
...institutional silence
...compulsory correction
...the inconvenience of love
Seventh-generation Mormon royalty. Closeted for forty years. A teaching career ended by the politics of fear. A marriage that crossed every line the governing narrative said couldn't be crossed. And a research program that anticipated the most consequential governance crisis of the twenty-first century — a decade before anyone else saw it coming.
Forbidden Friends traces four hundred years of colonialism through one family's DNA — from Puritan Massachusetts to polygamous Utah to the Driftless corridor of the Mississippi valley — and asks what it costs to grow up inside a narrative generation system whose authority you cannot question. Willful isolation. Enforced segregation. Rejection of enlightenment. The fourth edition integrates research endnotes connecting each chapter to the governance framework that the lived experience gave rise to.
The lions have finally found their historian.
This textbook, combined with the three speculative fiction novels and the autoethnography memoir also sold here, imagine a different world than we have now. This book teaches you how to build it.
A twelve-unit interdisciplinary curriculum that derives — requirement by requirement — a complete governance specification for AI narrative generation systems. Twenty-two requirements across six functional layers, each earned through first-principles analysis. The MOCSIE Systems architecture was designed between 2007 and 2016, a decade before the technology industry independently built every component the framework had specified — without the democratic governance layer.
The fiction dramatizes the architecture. The memoir provides the evidence. This textbook makes the imagination rigorous — and teachable.
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