Though Szelena Gray is only 30, she seems to have lived through a thousand elections—enough that she can sit down with you in a café just off Harvard Square and diagram a whole other American political landscape. On this afternoon, Gray, a rising star among professional activists, is describing the pernicious influence of Super PACs. “A Super PAC is basically a vehicle for hijacking the democratic election process,” she says. “We want to hijack the process back.”

Tall, with long dark hair, and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Gray nonetheless has the air of a woman wearing Charles James in a noir film. She’s talking about campaign-finance machinations with a theorist’s passion as she describes the project that has occupied her since last year: Mayday, a crowd-funded, nonpartisan Super PAC (Political Action Committee) designed expressly to “end all Super PACs.” (Super PACs are fund-raising entities with no limits on what they can spend to elect or defeat candidates; they require constant fund-raising, and typically make politicians beholden to their biggest donors.)

The escalation of this raise-and-spend mentality is nothing short of astonishing: While Mitt Romney’s Super PAC raised $12 million in the first six months of 2011 during the last election cycle, Jeb Bush’s Super PAC has already raised $103 million—the GDP of a small nation. At the moment, Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC fund-raising is far behind at more than $24 million—but with both individuals and corporations now free to donate millions at a time (before the landmark 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, donations were capped at $5,000), those numbers are about to escalate tremendously once the campaign season begins in earnest. And with 96 percent of Americans agreeing on the dire need for reform, campaign finance has become one of the few hot-button issues candidates from both parties are talking about—in the hopes of, as Hillary for America spokesperson Christina Reynolds says, “stopping the endless flow of secret, unaccountable money into our political system.”

Talk about a fix generally revolves hazily around the need for a constitutional amendment to impose limits on spending—something Clinton, for one, has long been on the record as supporting. Such a fix, though, given the glacial pace of constitutional reform, would likely be a generation away. “Amending the constitution is a 20-year fight,” says Gray. She aims to fix the system now.