The Vote Collectors
The True Story of the Scamsters, Politicians, and Preachers behind the Nation's Greatest Electoral Fraud
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
In November 2018, Baptist preacher Mark Harris beat the odds, narrowly fending off a blue wave in the sprawling Ninth District of North Carolina. But word soon got around that something fishy was going on in rural Bladen County. At the center of the mess was a local political operative named McCrae Dowless. Dowless had learned the ins and outs of the absentee ballot system from Democrats before switching over to the Republican Party. Bladen County's vote-collecting cottage industry made national headlines, led to multiple election fraud indictments, toppled North Carolina GOP leadership, and left hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians without congressional representation for nearly a year.
In The Vote Collectors, Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner tell the story of the political shenanigans in Bladen County, exposing the shocking vulnerability of local elections and explaining why our present systems are powerless to monitor and prevent fraud. In their hands, this tale of rural corruption becomes a fascinating narrative of the long clash of racism and electioneering—and a larger story about the challenges to democracy in the rural South.
At a time rife with accusations of election fraud, The Vote Collectors shows the reality of election stealing in one southern county, where democracy was undermined the old-fashioned way: one absentee ballot at a time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalists Graff and Ochsner debut with a fine-grained and vivid account of the 2018 North Carolina congressional race that was overturned because of electoral fraud. At the heart of the story is McCrae Dowless, the chain-smoking Republican operative indicted for leading a ballot-harvesting scheme in Bladen County that initially helped Baptist preacher Mark Harris eke out a narrow victory over the Democratic candidate, Dan McCready. When the state board of elections refused to certify the results, blame fell squarely on Dowless, who had been investigated for fraud in the 2016 election, but Graff and Ochsner persuasively argue that he's the "fall guy for a country that struggled to acknowledge its racist past and the role of big-money politics in exacerbating inequities." They also delve into the economic, racial, and political history of eastern North Carolina, documenting the 1898 white supremacist uprising in nearby Wilmington, N.C.; the collapse of tobacco farming in the 1980s and '90s and the rise of industrial hog farming; and the "white backlash" that followed the election of Bladen County's first Black sheriff in 2010. Throughout, the authors weave in intriguing bits of local color and draw trenchant connections to fraud claims in the 2020 presidential election. This doggedly reported chronicle sheds light on America's political dysfunctions.
