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

This book gave good insight into the problems our country faces in providing effective and honest voting opportunities. I like that the authors did a lot of research into the Bladen County voting scandal and all the probable causes behind it. The structure of the book was a little iffy, but the information spoke for itself by the end.

America's chowderheads delude themselves into believing in the existence of preposterously well-oiled and flawlessly-executed conspiracies to commit mass fraud during US elections. Meanwhile, actual voting conspiracies, like this one, are attempted on a smaller scale by rings of pathetic grifters and their dopey henchmen. These genuine real-life conspiracies fall apart because, well, people who do things like this are invariably not the sharpest knives in the drawer, all the way up the chain of command. I don't think it's a spoiler to tell you that the fate of this conspiracy is the same as many others: eventually, law enforcement zeroed in on the lowest and most vulnerable members of the conspiracy, got them to flip, and made their way up the organizational ladders as far as the circumstances, including but not limited to their budget and other resources, allow. The result here is the same as frequently happens elsewhere: public interest moves on once the little fish are prosecuted and jailed, and higher-up responsible parties go free.

It's hard to give an appropriate opinion about this book. It is, as another reviewer said, “all over the place.” It gives a coherent account of criminal and political activities which are often ambiguous and/or complicated to explain. I'm glad I read this book. But the book also has some chip-on-the-shoulder attitude. People from North Carolina are good people whom the world does not understand. No one outside of North Carolina, it seems, can understand it. Unfair news coverage by outsiders is repeatedly alluded to. Stephen Colbert is given as an example. Colbert was a political satirist – being unfair is part of his job.

It wasn't clear to me what the authors wanted from us non-North Carolinians. For example, at Kindle location 3125, after much of the scandal had played out:

Most of the news crews were gone, having swiped a white glove across the Bladen County shelf and deemed it dusty. But nobody seemed to want to stay and clean it up.

Is this genuinely what you want? A bunch of outsiders telling the people of North Carolina how to run their state? Really? I distinctly remember this being tried before, without much success.

I think the authors wanted us to like McCrae Dowless, who is the center of the story and the object of the most aggressive prosecution. They didn't succeed. Maybe the authors thought he was a likable rogue? I guess that was the point of calling him, at one point, “easy to like” and, at numerous other points, a “flim-flam man”. Here's a description of him from Kindle location 1094:

A flim-flam man pays attention. Far better than you might expect. McCrae doesn't miss much. He even has a habit of finishing sentences for you, mumbling the last words as if he knew them before you did. Your own words. He'll point to you as he says them, not only to make it clear he knew what you were about to say, but to validate if for you in the process. It's a remarkable trick, and one that comes natural to him.

I think that this is presented as if it is a sign of cunning intelligence on McCrae's part, but the habit of finishing other people's sentences while pointing at them is actually a sign of being, as my mother might have called it, “too smart by half,” that is, smart enough to anticipate what the other person was about to say, but not smart enough to know that pointing at people and finishing their sentences is obnoxious, and often counter-productive. A genuinely smart and crafty person might know how his interlocutor's sentence is about to end, but will allow the other person to finish, if only to show common courtesy, which might even pay off in the form of good will later on. But more generally, people, even if they aren't Mensa-certified, know that allowing someone to talk without interruption is good manners.

However, the authors succeed in proving that Dowless is the sort of man whose idea of a clever scheme is to take out a life insurance policy on a person who is already dead and then attempt to claim it shortly afterward. He is the sort of man who goes to jail for it, and then, when released, devotes time and energy attempting to ruin the career of the man who prosecuted him. The authors tell you all of this. It's really hard to find Dowless as charming as the authors claim he is.

McCrae Dowless did his election fraud – this time – in the service of Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris. (Dowless worked for Democrats previously.) Harris was declared the winner officially, but the state board of elections refused to certify his victory, and eventually a new election was called, in which Harris did not run. Later, the district attorney on the case declined to charge Harris, although the evidence against him was pretty damning. The authors seem outraged at this, seeming to say: See? The big fish gets away.

Harris is not a big fish. He is a Baptist pastor and now 55 years old. He was very sick during the events which undid his supposed victory. It cost him a lot of money and ripped his family apart. Perhaps it's hard to feel sorry for him, but it was pretty clear that, after the scandal, he was retiring from politics and was not going to become a serial voter fraudster because he was allowed to walk free. Any prosecution might have backfired if the defense was able to portray the prosecution of Harris as a witch hunt and/or a waste of taxpayer money. The decision not to prosecute any further up the political food chain is NOT, I feel, a sign of nation-ending systematic corruption, but a practical decision by people and governments that have limited time and energy.

(An aside: The son of Mark Harris, John, who strangely came out of the scandal with a reputation for integrity not only preserved but actually strengthened, has announced, just yesterday as I write this, that he will run for the North Carolina state legislature. See an article here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/election/article257359572.html )

Summary: A good book when it sticks to saying what happened.

I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book from the University of North Carolina Press via Netgalley. Thanks for the free stuff. (less)

Book Review in Non-Fiction, History, United States, Law
The Vote Collectors: The True Story of the Scamsters, Politicians, and Preachers behind the Nation’s Greatest Electoral Fraud
By Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner University of North Carolina Press 296 pp.
Reviewed by Randy Cepuch
January 7, 2022
An unlikely tale, and yet…


Roughly two-thirds of Republicans continue to believe the 2020 presidential election results were tainted by fraud. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Democrats believe voting fraud is vanishingly rare. Lawsuits filed by Donald Trump supporters alleging fraud have almost universally been thrown out of court for lack of evidence, in some cases by judges Trump himself appointed.

Election rules are set by states and generally administered by counties or municipalities, each with their own way of doing things. Any effort to conspire successfully on a national basis would require an unimaginable number of people both to do the wrong thing and to keep their lips zipped. And as the party game “telephone” demonstrates, it’s virtually impossible for even a small group of people to keep their story straight or even coherent for long.

Even at the local level, there are typically too many believers in the sanctity of democracy — Democrats and Republicans who check their party affiliations at the door and take oaths to work together for the common good, serving as election officers — for fraud to be anything other than rare.

But from time to time, it does happen. The Vote Collectors explains just how it did not long ago in rural Bladen County, North Carolina.

Authors Michael Graff (a reporter at Axios Charlotte) and Nick Ochsner (chief investigative reporter at WBTV in Charlotte) prove to be an effective team both in terms of researching and storytelling. From time to time, what their reporting reveals — in part, through an unlikely friendship with the book’s protagonist — affects the course of events.

That protagonist is McRae Dowless, a chain-smoking former used-car-lot manager who’s been married 11 times (to nine different women). Dowless is also a convicted felon who went to prison in the 1990s for insurance fraud; he attempted to buy a policy for a dead man and then collect on it.

Beginning in 2006, he served in various campaign capacities for a variety of candidates (Republican and Democrat), and in 2012 and 2016, he won election himself to the Bladen County Soil and Water Conservation Board.

There are fewer than 22,000 registered voters in Bladen County, and Dowless believed he knew a lot about influencing their preferences. It was a reasonable belief, given his strong record of getting out the votes needed for his employers to win elections — especially votes cast using absentee ballots.

But in 2016 and 2018, there were plenty of questions about absentee ballots in Bladen County, and about how Dowless worked his magic. In the 2018 election, Dowless worked for Rev. Mark Harris, a Republican running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives who seemed to have won until clear evidence of fraud led to the results being overturned — an unprecedented event in U.S. history.

Among the many odd twists along the way, a candidate (Dowless himself!) challenged a race in which he was the victor and in which an attorney argued that write-in names could be added to ballots by anyone, not just voters themselves.

In testimony before the North Carolina Board of Elections, associates of Dowless — including friends and family members — told shady stories of being paid to “help” people fill out absentee ballots and then “harvesting” those ballots by offering to mail them. Neither practice is legal.

Apparently, such things had been commonplace for a while in Bladen County; in 2016, a voter actually filed a complaint with the county that no one had come to (illegally) pick up his ballot.

Election troubles have a long history in North Carolina. Graff and Ochsner take readers back to the days of violence, poll taxes, and literacy tests being used to intimidate and exclude Black voters. They also look at how modern-day gerrymandering means that although more North Carolinians are Democrats than Republicans, the latter party holds eight of the state’s 13 seats in Congress.

In 2019, Dowless was charged with mishandling ballots, obstructing justice, perjury, and solicitation to commit perjury. His trial is scheduled to begin in August 2022. Ten others have also been arrested in connection with the illegal voting activities during the 2016 and 2018 elections. Meanwhile, Dowless is set to report to prison to serve six months for defrauding Social Security by claiming a disability in 2013 and not reporting his income as an election consultant.

As the authors observe, Republicans will see The Vote Collectors as proof that voter fraud happens. Democrats, meanwhile, will note that proof of such shenanigans is exceptionally rare and that the perpetrators (and beneficiaries) often turn out to be Republicans.

The book doesn’t spend much time talking about the 2020 presidential election, but it does mention that, in September 2020, then President Trump was in North Carolina when he tacitly encouraged his followers to commit fraud by attempting to vote twice — first via absentee ballot and then at polling places. According to the New York Times, Trump told a Wilmington crowd:

“Let them send it in and let them go vote, and if their system’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote. If it isn’t tabulated, they’ll be able to vote. That’s the way it is. And that’s what they should do.”

Of course, to keep voters safe during the pandemic, absentee ballots played a larger role than usual in the 2020 election. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission reported that more than half a million absentee ballots were rejected in 2020, but that’s less than one percent of the total number returned. Among the reasons: non-matching or non-existent signatures; an in-person vote had already been cast; the ballot was not received in time; or the individual wasn’t eligible to vote.

According to calculations by the Hill, even if all the ballots rejected had been cast for Trump, there would not have been a single state where the presidential race results changed. In other words, the system worked as it was supposed to, and election fraud is exceedingly unlikely.

And yet…

Randy Cepuch spent 17 years as an elections officer, polling-place chief, and part-time office of elections employee. He encourages anyone with doubts about the integrity of elections to see how things work firsthand by volunteering at their local office of elections.

I throughly enjoyed reading this book. To fully understand the voter fraud from the Ninth district in North Carolina, the back history is critical. The authors did an excellent job explaining these historical events. Past race relations played a significant role in the power dynamics that led to the voter fraud & suppression examined in this book. The case of voter fraud was fascinating & almost seems too fake to be real. If you enjoy reading about all the ins & outs of politics, you will enjoy reading this book.

I found this book to be very well-written and important given our current political climate. It touches upon how "voter fraud" is not as persistent as we've been told recently while voter suppression has been and still is.

At first, I found the book to be a little all over the place, with a lack of structure that flowed well. There's times when the authors go into a lot of detail that doesn't seem very relevant to the overarching point of the book. However, I think if the synopsis was updated to include the racial, historical, economical, and environmental issues that play into the story it would solve this initial confusion. As a reader who just knew about the book from what the synopsis said, it was difficult for the first part of the book.

The second part of the book was definitely the most informative and showcased how history plays a huge role in what is happening politically within the United States. I think overall the book is informative but not reactive.