By Jebb Filz — The Architect of Fire

My kids go to Appleton Area schools. Two of them, anyway.

Last week, the district sent home a flyer. There’s a referendum on April 7th. They’re asking for $15 million a year — four years — because the state froze school funding adjustments in 2009 and never turned them back on. Costs kept rising. Funding didn’t. The district has burned through its reserves and now faces cutting 100 positions if the vote fails.

The tax impact is $45 a year on a $300,000 home. Three dollars and seventy-five cents a month. Less than a coffee.

I can’t vote on it.

I’m a felon. Wisconsin doesn’t restore voting rights until you complete supervision. Every year. Every condition. Every box checked. I won’t be eligible until 2032.

So here I am. A father of three. A taxpayer. A man who shows up to work every day, builds systems at night, and is raising kids inside the very schools this referendum is designed to protect. And I don’t get a say.

Let me tell you what I do get to do.

I get to watch.

I get to watch my son’s class sizes potentially increase because a district that already spends $2,300 less per student than the state average can’t close a $13 million gap that the state created. I get to watch the same state that promised to reimburse 67% of special education costs deliver 25-30%, forcing the district to cover over $100 million out of pocket in four years. I get to watch 87% of Wisconsin school districts resort to referendums because the legislature won’t fund education.

And I get to watch all of this while having zero mechanism to express my opinion through the one channel that supposedly matters in a democracy.

Here’s what’s interesting about disenfranchisement: it doesn’t remove you from the system. It just removes your voice from it. You still pay taxes. Your kids still attend the schools. You still drive on the roads, drink the water, breathe the air that policy shapes. You are fully subject to every consequence of governance while being fully excluded from its input.

You are, in the most literal sense, governed without consent.

The founders had a phrase for this. They went to war over it.

But I’m not writing this to complain. I’m writing this because the experience reveals something most voters never see: the architecture of participation is broken, and voting is the least of it.

Here’s what I mean.

The same week that referendum flyer arrived, a 50-year-old nonprofit called Newcap — serving 10 counties in northeast Wisconsin, including mine — announced it’s shutting down. Financial mismanagement. A $2 million deficit. The state pulled their weatherization contract. 134 households are about to lose housing.

My coworker John is being evicted. Not because he did anything wrong. The house he rents is being sold. The safety net that might have helped him — Newcap — is dissolving.

I didn’t vote for the people who underfunded the schools. I didn’t vote for the people who failed to oversee Newcap. I didn’t vote for the housing policies that left John exposed. But I’m living in the blast radius of all of it.

And so are my kids.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about losing your right to vote: it doesn’t make you less political. It makes you more. Because when you can’t change the system through a ballot, you start looking at the system itself. You stop asking “who should I vote for?” and start asking “why does this architecture keep failing regardless of who’s in charge?”

The school funding formula was broken before I lost my rights and it’ll be broken after I get them back. Newcap wasn’t destroyed by a bad election — it was destroyed by a coordination failure that no single vote could have prevented. John isn’t losing his home because of a policy position — he’s losing it because housing in America is treated as an investment vehicle instead of infrastructure.

These are architecture problems. And architecture problems don’t get solved in voting booths.

They get solved by people who build.

So I build.

I’m building an AI system that catches fraud at my own workplace — because the people who are supposed to be accountable aren’t, and no election is going to change that.

I’m writing a treatment for XPRIZE about ending hunger — not through charity or policy, but through a coordination layer that connects existing systems that have never been wired together.

I’m raising three kids and trying to show them that the system doesn’t define you. That your past doesn’t dictate your future. That when they take away your voice, you build a louder one.

I can’t vote on April 7th. But I can write this. And I can build the thing that makes the broken architecture visible to everyone who can.

The referendum will pass or fail without me. The schools will adapt or they won’t. The state will continue underfunding education while pointing at local taxpayers to fill the gap.

But in 2032, when I walk into a polling station for the first time in over a decade, I won’t be casting a vote based on a flyer. I’ll be casting it based on years of watching the machine from the outside — seeing every gear, every broken tooth, every place where the design fails the people it claims to serve.

That’s not a punishment. That’s an education.

And it’s one they can’t take away.

Ex-con. Father. Fire-bringer.

I can’t vote. But I can build. And building is louder.