The Vote Collectors: The True Story of the Scamsters, Politicians, and Preachers behind the Nation's Greatest Electoral Fraud

by Michael Graff, Nick Ochsner

Overview

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.  
 
In The Vote Collectors, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469665566
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Series:	A Ferris and Ferris Book
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	1,063,748
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Michael Graff is the Southern bureau chief for Axios Charlotte. Nick Ochsner is chief investigative reporter at WBTV in Charlotte, NC.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

To understand the truth behind the voter fraud accusations that continue to roil the country, there's no better place to look than Bladen County, N.C., and no better person to talk to than charming, chain-smoking McCrae Dowless. Through their exclusive access to McCrae, Ochsner and Graff are able to unravel the secrets of Bladen County's election drama, a tale that stretches all the way from Reconstruction, through the Voting Rights Act, to today's election-integrity wars. The Vote Collectors reveals what happened in this one county in North Carolina while delivering an urgent warning about what's happening everywhere else.—Zoe Chace, producer, This American Life and host of The Improvement Association

The Vote Collectors,, an intense nonfiction drama, sings like a novel and shocks like a rigged court case. It's sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking—always building, never slow. Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner describe, dead-on, the rural America that brings discomfort to comfortable city folks—the real, up-close rural America where small-minded power brokers gather in small rooms to work and rework a system in which justice has become a sad, outdated myth. The Vote Collectors is about a struggling rural county, and thus it is about a struggling South, and thus it is about a struggling America—where unleashed politicians successfully goad citizens to loathe each other. Drop your cable 'news' shows; read a book that is about real things. Our times are too much like 1860 to sit home and watch TV." —Clyde Edgerton, author of Walking across Egypt and The Night Train

The story of the election fraud that upended a 2018 congressional election in Bladen County, North Carolina, received national attention when it occurred. But authors Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner give readers not only a deeper look into the players in the election fraud, which caused officials to throw out the results of that congressional race, but also a rich and detailed history of a place in which class and race have long been central to the political discourse, and of the people who live there. A well-crafted narrative by two reporters with local ties and firsthand knowledge of the area."—Ron Nixon, Global Investigative Editor, Associated Press

Editorial Reviews

09/13/2021

Journalists Graff and Ochsner debut with a fine-grained and vivid account of the 2018 North Carolina congressional race that was overturned because of electoral fraud. At the heart of the story is McCrae Dowless, the chain-smoking Republican operative indicted for leading a ballot-harvesting scheme in Bladen County that initially helped Baptist preacher Mark Harris eke out a narrow victory over the Democratic candidate, Dan McCready. When the state board of elections refused to certify the results, blame fell squarely on Dowless, who had been investigated for fraud in the 2016 election, but Graff and Ochsner persuasively argue that he’s the “fall guy for a country that struggled to acknowledge its racist past and the role of big-money politics in exacerbating inequities.” They also delve into the economic, racial, and political history of eastern North Carolina, documenting the 1898 white supremacist uprising in nearby Wilmington, N.C.; the collapse of tobacco farming in the 1980s and ’90s and the rise of industrial hog farming; and the “white backlash” that followed the election of Bladen County’s first Black sheriff in 2010. Throughout, the authors weave in intriguing bits of local color and draw trenchant connections to fraud claims in the 2020 presidential election. This doggedly reported chronicle sheds light on America’s political dysfunctions. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

A fine-grained and vivid account of the 2018 North Carolina congressional race that was overturned because of electoral fraud...Throughout, the authors weave in intriguing bits of local color and draw trenchant connections to fraud claims in the 2020 presidential election. This doggedly reported chronicle sheds light on America's political dysfunctions."—Publishers Weekly

Graff and Ochsner's narrative moves like a novel, tying its story to the county's past...thorough and compelling."—Foreword Reviews

[A] fascinating read. Recommended for readers interested in politics and North Carolina."—Library Journal

In-depth reporting and journalistic flair...A useful book for policymakers and politics junkies."—Kirkus Reviews

On the heels of one of the most volatile presidential elections in recent memory, The Vote Collectors is a pointed look at the 2018 congressional election in North Carolina's Bladen County...[The book] uses this story to explore the weakness of current voting systems, specifically in the South, given the historical scars of racism in elections and voting rights...Recommended for readers interested in politics and American history, as well as the intersection of voting rights."—Affinity Magazine

In The Vote Collectors, that scandal—which made national headlines for months—is secondary to a more comprehensive examination of its historical, economic, and political antecedents in Bladen County and oft-forgotten eastern North Carolina...The authors unfurl the story in three parts: a deep probe into the history of post-Civil War eastern North Carolina sandwiched by more recent developments in Bladen County, leading up to and after the 2018 election."—Charlotte Magazine

A fascinating narrative of the long clash of racism and electioneering—and a larger story about the challenges to democracy in the rural South."—WRAL

From the Publisher

10/01/2021

In this collaboration, two Charlotte, NC—based reporters (Graff, of the website Axios, and Ochsner, of WBTV) look into an infamous case of voter fraud in North Carolina's Bladen County. In November 2018, officials declined to certify the Ninth District Congressional race because of irregularities in absentee ballot collection, and McCrae Dowless, an operative hired by the Republican candidate Mark Harris, was a few months later accused of election fraud and mishandling absentee ballots collected in the county. Graff and Ochsner argue that the case was not as clear-cut as it seemed and that the events were influenced by racial tensions and the history of the area. The authors' sources include many exclusive interviews with Dowless; the book also presents portraits of other key players. The first part of the book explores the events leading up to the 2018 election, in which resentment over the 2010 sheriff's race contributed to overzealous vote collecting. The second part looks at race relations in the region from the end of the Civil War to the present era, including white supremacist movements, the Wilmington massacre of 1898, and the 2014 death of student Lennon Lacy, the cause of which remains contested. The third part recounts the aftermath of the 2018 election. VERDICT Graff and Ochsner's colloquial style makes a dry subject into a fascinating read. Recommended for readers interested in politics and North Carolina.—Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Library Journal

2021-09-18
Two Charlotte-based reporters examine the Bladen County, North Carolina, vote-collecting scandal of 2018 and how it became a national lightning rod for election fraud.

Early on, Graff and Ochsner set the scene in rural Bladen County, home to the Smithfield Foods hog-processing plant. “All around eastern North Carolina,” they write, “rural hospitals were closing, opioids were slicing families apart, hurricanes seemed to pour harder every year, and the only thing people of all politics and races could agree on is that crooks in Washington don’t give a damn about them.” In their rigorously reported, fairly slow-moving narrative packed with dialogue, the authors reach back into some political history of the county to shed light on the shifting dynamics of racial politics. In 2010, the authors note, though the county had more than twice the number of White voters as Black voters, there were more than 15,000 registered Democrats compared to 2,800 Republicans. However, many of the Democrats descended from the anti–civil rights Dixiecrats of the mid-1900s. In a crucial midterm year, there evolved a “volatile political concoction—the national resistance to Obama, the statewide GOP organization, and the local divide between White Democrats and Black Democrats.” Into this fraught landscape stepped McCrae Dowless, a convicted felon and “low-budget operative” who was “obsessive” about the machinations of electoral politics. After cutting his teeth with the Democrats—and learning about the absentee ballot system—he switched to the Republican Party. In 2018, Mark Harris, a Baptist preacher running as a Republican in the district, hired Dowless to pay clueless citizens (“vote collectors”) to go door to door and collect absentee ballots, a practice that is illegal. Harris won, and this small-town story gained some national attention, feeding the larger issue of election trust that is still dominating headlines three years later. The text features in-depth reporting and journalistic flair, but the audience may be limited by the hyperlocal focus.

A useful book for policymakers and politics junkies.

Kirkus Reviews