Down for the Count
Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With the 2016 election season in full flower, Gumbel, a British-born journalist, has "updated and thoroughly revised" his 2005 work Steal This Vote to further showcase the shortcomings of American representative democracy. The veteran columnist lists a number of defects in a history of "dirty elections," such as gerrymandering, lack of national uniformity in voting rules, restrictive voter ID laws in several GOP-controlled states, over-the-top campaign spending, and instances of voter fraud. Integrating interviews with officials from both major political parties and a keen analysis of transgressions past and present, Gumbel digs into the racist, exclusionary legality of Jacksonian democracy, the strong-arm tactics of Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall machine, the methodical obstacles to voting in the Jim Crow South, the bully-boy grip of Richard Daley's Chicago, the Bush vs. Gore Florida recount fiasco, and the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. The history of the American system is rife with documented examples of disenfranchisement and voter suppression. As former president Jimmy Carter observed in 2004, "The American political system wouldn't measure up to any sort of international standards." Gumbel's assured, confident voice holds the reader's attention as he cautions against "apathy and political disengagement."
