THE VOTE COLLECTORS

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.