Down for the Count: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America

by Andrew Gumbel

The updated edition of Steal This Vote ―a rollicking history of US voter suppression and fraud from Jacksonian democracy to Citizens United and beyond.
 
In Down for the Count , award-winning journalist Andrew Gumbel explores the tawdry history of elections in the United States. From Jim Crow to Tammany Hall to the Bush v. Gore Florida recount, it is a chronicle of votes bought, stolen, suppressed, lost, miscounted, thrown into rivers, and litigated up to the Supreme Court. Gumbel then uses this history to explain why America is now experiencing the biggest backslide in voting rights in more than a century.
 
First published in 2005 as Steal This Vote , this thoroughly revised and updated edition reveals why America faces so much trouble running clean, transparent elections. And it demonstrates how the partisan battles now raging over voter IDs, campaign spending, and minority voting rights fit into a long, largely unspoken tradition of hostility to the very notion of representative democracy.
 
Interviewing Democrats, Republicans, and a range of voting rights activists, Gumbel offers an engaging and accessible analysis of how our democratic integrity is so often corrupted by racism, money, and power. In an age of high-stakes electoral combat, billionaire-backed candidacies, and bottom-of-the-barrel campaigning, this book is more important than ever.
 
“In a riveting and frightening account, Gumbel . . . traces election fraud in America from the 18th century to the present . . . [the issues he] so winningly addresses are crucial to the future of democracy.” ― Publishers Weekly, on Steal This Vote

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History

304 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2016

About the author

Journalist who has worked as foreign correspondent for The Guardian, Independent, The Los Angeles Times and The Atlantic.

Reviews

[Darnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gets weaker as it goes along, no doubt because there's less time for perspective on the history involved and more partisan rancor. I appreciated the historical sections, and it's valuable to note that democracy in the USA has pretty much always been a fraudulent mess. The events of the latter half of the book will probably need a few more decades for a good summary to be written concerning them.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 1 out of 5]

I often find it amusing when writers fail to show the sense of realism that America's founders had while simultaneously trying to impugn the motives of those same men and deny the worth of the constitution that they made.  This does not necessarily mean such books are good, as this book is not, but it is revealing when people who themselves cannot admit to the corruption that is inside of their own dark hearts or come to grips with the full panoply of that corruption nevertheless believe that there is some way that technology or new laws can overcome the corruption, including the rather laughable suggestion that there exists a class of nonpartisan professionals who would not try to corruptly use the power they would gain over counting votes not to put a European-style managed democracy in place to change our own nation's government in ways that would suit their own ideological and political worldviews.  The author approaches this subject from the point of view of moral superiority in that he decries Republican corruption and views concerns about vote harvesting as being mere fig leaves to cover a racist agenda, and it is therefore hard to take him seriously given his own flagrantly obvious bias.

This particular book is a bit more than 200 pages and is divided into fourteen chapters.  The author begins with a note and an introduction that laments that corruption of the present political system.  After that the author connects antidemocratic traditions with the new right as if the new left is more democratic (1).  This then looks at the connection between our political system and slavery (2) before discussing the rise of machine politics through patronage, liquor, and graft (3).  After that the author discusses the 1876 election as the theft of the century (4) and also the paradox of political reform with a look at the election of 1896 (5).  The author complains about the disenfranchisement of the South (6) and looks at mob rule in Chicago (7).  The author correctly notes that the technological fix does not solve the problem of voter fraud (8) and then discusses the 2000 election in Florida (9).  Various discussions of the failure of miracle cures (10), the 2004 election (11) and the 3 percent cure (12) then lead to a discussion of the way that votes are bought and suppressed at present (13), and a final complaint about the relationship between the super-rich and the future of Democracy (14).  The book then ends with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.

There are many aspects of this book that demonstrate the difficulty of taking him seriously.  The author's praise of the Oregon voting system by mail and the failure to recognize the many ways in which this aids Democratic voting fraud and the way that the author fails to admit that it was a Democrat who made Florida's notorious 2000 butterfly ballot suggest that even where Democratic fraud is admitted that the author would prefer to limit his anger against fraud to either historical examples far in the past (of which there are many) or to Republicans and Southern Democrats, so as to not anger the author's base of holier than thou contemporary leftists whose own political behavior has no shortage of fraudulent means to lead to what they view (incorrectly) as worthwhile ends.  There are innumerable ways in which the voting can be corrupted, and in general they result from the darkness at the heart of human beings to control others and enforce their opinion upon others and the fact that this author seeks to look for bureaucratic solutions to this darkness suggests a lack of realism that ignores the darkness in his own heart or those of its allies, for what class is more corrupt at present than that of bureaucrats who view themselves as the natural rulers of the society despite their lack of any kind of legitimacy to rule over them.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although infuriating to hear of all the dirty elections pretty much since our country’s founding; it was eye-opening and important to learn. Gumbel did a great job making the information never seem to dull, even with all the necessary facts and figures stated throughout the book. Also, the fact he wrote a second edition to talk about the 2008 and 2012 election makes me excited to see if his prophetic wisdom would apply in retrospect to the 2016 and 2020 elections as well. All that respect the idea of democracy in the United States should read this in my opinion.

[Tracey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, that was depressing. And scary. I was especially interested in the chapter about voting machines, but the parts about the 1960 election and, of course, the debacle in Florida in 2000 were fascinating, too.

One spooky coincidence - I read a story in the news yesterday about a very elderly woman in North Carolina who has been "caged" - a method of voter suppression where a candidate or party sends out mass mailings and uses returned pieces to try to get people stricken from the voter rolls. In this case, the woman uses a PO box, so the mailing to her street address was returned. I'd never heard of that particular voter-supression method before. Later that day, I opened the book and there was a description of caging, which evidently has been around for quite a few years.

[Craigtator · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another in a line of books that I've read recently that exposes the lies that are fed to us.

This describes the whole ugly, racist, incompetent mess that the United States has made of voting.

It's depressing reading but it's important to understand and recognize when/how/why we are being lied to.

[Constantine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look at how elections actually get stolen.