Oh, for the days when this was the worst Koch you had to worry about.
Oh, for the days when this was the worst Koch you had to worry about. lev radin / Shutterstock.com

Senator Tammy Baldwin (she's great; you like her) recently sent around a fundraising email telling donors that "dark money spending is 10 times what it was at the same point in the 2012 election cycle. And in 2012, it ended up topping $308 million."

You might not know exactly what "dark money" is, but it certainly sounds like something dangerous, doesn't it? That's because it IS something dangerous: the term refers to a scheme whereby rich guys buy politicians by funneling money through nonprofits.

Because the nonprofits don't have to report funding sources, the wealthy can fund election efforts without anyone ever finding out about it, which means voters will never know which evil billionaire/corporation has purchased their "elected" officials. The conservative Koch brothers are one of the largest funding sources.

Politifact checked Baldwin's claim, and she's right:

For the 2016 cycle, $4.88 million in dark money expenditures have already been made... That’s more than 10 times the $440,000 that was spent at this point during the 2012 cycle.

So what can regular voters do about it?

Ha ha ha, trick question, sorry guys! Nothing, really, unless you have a lot of money, which you do not. So far the big spenders on 2016 races have been the US Chamber of Commerce, with $3 million; Americans for Prosperity (that's a Koch Brothers venture that helped launch the Tea Party) with $1.5 million; and Planned Parenthood with $75,000. We have no way of knowing who's funding them, but I'm willing to bet that Stranger readers have, at most, donated money to only one of those groups.

The Koch brothers, for their part, claim that all of their political purchases are reported. The appropriate response to this claim is uproarious laughter giving way to sobbing and then drinks. Their company, Koch Industries, made $115 billion last year and doesn't have to disclose anything that it gives. And the Kochs personally donated millions of unreported dollars, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. They're probably responsible for about 25 percent of all dark money. (Their network Freedom Partners was "responsible for about 1 in 4 of the total dark money dollars spent in 2012.")

Most of the spending is going towards "toss up" elections — races for Congress where a little spending could push voters to one party or another. Shrewd dark-money-spenders are dropping cash to try to tilt the makeup of Congress, and naturally, most of the money is tilting towards Republicans.

Of course, there's a free way to influence the 2016 elections: you could vote. But you only get to do it once. Billionaires can spend as much money as they want, because it's "free speech"; but you only get one single vote. Don't spend it all in one place.

So, is your one vote enough to counteract billions of dollars' worth of misleading ads and phone banks and mailers and robocalls and lobbyists and who knows what else?

Uhhh, probably not, but let's hope so. Because the only other way to stop dark money is to put new laws in place, limiting secret campaign spending. And unfortunately, the people in charge of writing and passing laws are the very people who have been purchased by dark money.