Steal this vote : dirty elections and the rotten history of democracy in America

A FEW DAYS before the November 2004 election, Jimmy Carter was asked what would happen if, instead of flying to Zambia or Venezuela or East Timor, his widely respected international election-monitoring team was invited to turn its attention to the United States. Includes bibliographical references (p. 347-354) and index How to steal an election -- The antidemocratic tradition and the new right -- pt. 1. Voting in the age before mechanization -- Slavery and the system -- Patronage, liquor, and graft: the ascent of machine politics -- The theft of the century -- The 1896 watershed and the paradox of reform -- The long agony of the disenfranchised South -- Chicago: the other kind of mob rule -- pt. 2. Voting in the machine age -- Levers, punch cards, and the fallacy of the technological fix -- Democracy's frangible connections: Florida 2000 -- The miracle solution -- Backlash -- Round on the ends and high in the middle: Election 2004 -- Democracy here and there -- The democratic future The 2000 presidential election meltdown and the more recent controversy about computer voting machines did not come out of the blue. Steal This Vote tells the fraught but very colorful history of electoral malfeasance in the United States. It is a tale of votes bought, stolen, suppressed, lost, cast more than once, assigned to dead people and pets, miscounted, thrown into rivers, and litigated all the way to the Supreme Court. (No wonder America has the lowest voter participation rate of any Western democracy!). The 2000 presidential election meltdown and the more recent controversy about computer voting machines did not come out of the blue. Steal This Vote tells the fraught but very colorful history of electoral malfeasance in the United States. It is a tale of votes bought, stolen, suppressed, lost, cast more than once, assigned to dead people and pets, miscounted, thrown into rivers, and litigated all the way to the Supreme Court. (No wonder America has the lowest voter participation rate of any Western democracy!) Andrew Gumbelwhose work on the new electronic voting fraud has been praised by Gore Vidal and Paul Krugman, and has won a Project Censored Awardshows that, for all the idealism about American democracy, free and fair elections have been the exception, not the rule. In fact, Gumbel suggests that Tammany Hall, shrouded as it is in moral odium, might have been a fairer system than we have today, because ostensibly positive developments like the secret ballot have been used to squash voting rights ever since. The author details the history of electoral fraud in America, from Tammany Hall to the 2000 election, revealing many examples of misconduct on election day and arguing that free and fair elections have been the exception in the U.S. rather than the norm. Original. Andrew Gumbel. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.