The Vote Collectors

The True Story of the Scamsters, Politicians, and Preachers Behind the Nation's Greatest Electoral Fraud

By: Michael Graff, Nick Ochsner

Narrated by: Nick Ochsner

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.

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.

©2021 Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Excellent

I’m so impressed by the depth of storytelling and the way it had me on the hook for more throughout the book. I enjoyed hearing the thorough details of events around the voting scandal along with the history of voting in the state. I learned a lot and the book flew by. Well done all around. Nick is a great narrator!

There's no equivalence

Strong, detailed account of electoral fraud in North Carolina. The book's only shortcoming is the authors' efforts to attempt to mitigate the criminality by painting it as a bipartisan affair. Clearly an attempt to not entirely alienate right-wingers (as if they didn't know what was coming anyway). The authors do a fairly decent job of delineating between the primary tool of fraudulent practices, a cretinous opportunist named McCrae Dowless, and the motivations behind employing them. On one side there is historical suppression of the vote by poll taxes, citizenship tests and obsolete equipment to overcome. On the other, there is the frenzied defense of the unholy trinity of corporate capitalism, white supremacy and christian purity. It would be a disgrace to attempt to conflate or equate the two. And it should come as no surprise that the true criminality skews well to right when judging scale.