Michael Graff

The Publisher Says: 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.

In their preface to this second edition, Graff and Ochsner bring the story up to date, as accusations of voter fraud continue to pervade our national discourse. 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: While I did not love the book’s structure, I *did* resonate to its message and purpose: documenting and publicizing the voter fraud committed in the 2018 election by the North Carolina GOP in search of a national majority in the US Congress to further their regressive agenda. I have reaffirmed my belief that guilty people accuse others of their own crimes as a result of reading this book.

You should read it, too, as we approach the 2024 elections. If you imagine that catching these perpetrators of voter fraud is enough to scare the others out there into compliance with the law, think again...these are True Believers in A Cause, men—mostly—on a mission. Vigilance of the citizenry is the only resource we have left to combat this criminal undertaking. The authors are at pains to detail the toothlessness of oversight allowed by the state’s law on North Carolina’s local elections. It is not terribly different in the rest of the country.

The center of the 2018 plot was a man the authors seem to have a lot more sympathy and affection for than is warranted in my observation of their own descriptions of him: McCrae Dowless. A convicted insurance fraudster who transitioned to political fraud with apparent ease, Dowless was a Democratic operative who switched sides and ramped up the lawbreaking after he learned the ropes. His early death has failed to elicit from me more than a "what a relief at least one is gone" response.

Not a book to be dipped in and out of, because the level of detail can grow hazy in one's mind after too much time away. Also not a light little romp through one event in a bygone election. This stuff is going on now, and it will not stop until the silent, bored, apathetic parts of the electorate get off their "ignorance is bliss, if we don't think about it, it will go away" poses.

Voter suppression is real, and a real problem. It is time to Vay attention to it. Start here. The second edition is $23.00 for a trade paperback, preorders for March 2024 at the UNC website|first edition $8.53 on Kindle, available now… (mais)