The Vote Collectors

In November 2018,Baptist preacher Mark Harris beat the oddsnarrowly 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 headlinesled to multiple election fraud indictmentstoppled North Carolina GOP leadershipand left hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians without congressional representation for nearly a year. In The Vote CollectorsMichael Graff and Nick Ochsner tell the story of the political shenanigans in Bladen Countyexposing the shocking vulnerability of local elections and explaining why our present systems are powerless to monitor and prevent fraud. In their handsthis 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 fraudThe Vote Collectors shows the reality of election stealing in one southern countywhere democracy was undermined the old-fashioned way: one absentee ballot at a time.