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PRAISE FOR DOWN FOR THE COUNT
“It’s a free country, as the saying goes, but a modern, well-functioning,
mature democracy? Not even close. In this fast-paced ride through the
seamy past and alarming present of America’s ramshackle, corruptible electoral
machinery, Gumbel tells a tale of American exceptionalism with a vengeance.”
—HENDRIK HERTZBERG, STAFF W RITER, THE NEW YORKER
“The right to vote is not only the cornerstone of American democracy; it is also
the right upon which all our other rights depend. Down for the Count offers
an eye-opening account of this country’s long history of meddling and voter
suppression, and it establishes vital, disturbing connections between the
rise of Jim Crow and the most recent attacks on voting integrity.”
—BEN JEALOUS,FORMER PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE NAACP
D own for the Count explores the tawdry history of elections in the
United States—a chronicle of votes bought, stolen, suppressed, lost,
miscounted, thrown into rivers, and litigated up to the U.S. Supreme
Court—and uses it to explain why we are now experiencing the big-
gest backslide in voting rights in more than a century. This thoroughly
revised edition, first published to acclaim and some controversy in 2005
as Steal This Vote, reveals why America is unique among established West-
ern democracies in its inability to run clean, transparent elections. And
it demonstrates, in crisp, clear, accessible language, how the partisan bat-
tles now raging over voter ID, out-of-control campaign spending, and
minority voting rights fit into a long, largely unspoken tradition of hostil-
ity to the very notion of representative democracy.
Andrew Gumbel, an award-winning reporter for The Guardian and
other publications, has interviewed Democrats, Republicans, and a range
of voting rights activists to offer a multifaceted, deeply researched, and
engaging critical assessment of a system whose ostensible commitment
to democratic integrity often falls apart on contact with race, money, and
power. In an age of high-stakes electoral combat, billionaire-backed can-
didacies, and bottom-of-the-barrel campaigning, there can be no better
time to read this troubling and revealing book.
www.thenewpress.com
COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY BAIN COLLECTION/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
THE NEW PRESS COVER DESIGN BY DAVID SHOEMAKER
THE NEW PRESS
Andrew Gumbel is a British-born journalist, based in Los
Angeles, who has won awards for his work as an investiga-
tive reporter, a political columnist, and a feature writer. For
more than twenty years he worked as a foreign correspon-
dent for Reuters and the British newspapers The Guardian
and The Independent, covering stories in Europe, the Middle
East, and the Americas. He covered the first democratic elec-
tions in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and
has frequently reported on contested or suspect elections
since in Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, Haiti, and, since 2000, in
the United States. He writes frequently about the criminal
justice system as well as politics for publications that have
included The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the Los An-
geles Review of Books, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Vanity
Fair. He is the author of several books, including Oklahoma
City: What the Investigation Missed—And Why It Still Mat-
ters (HarperCollins, 2012).
Also by Andrew Gumbel
Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed—
and Why It Still Matters
DOWN FOR
THE COUNT
DIRTY ELECTIONS AND THE ROTTEN
HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
ANDREW GUMBEL
THE NEW PRESS
NEW YORK
LONDON
To my children, the voters of the future
© 2005, 2016 by Andrew Gumbel
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the
publisher.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions
Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.
First published as Steal This Vote by Nation Books, New York, 2005
This revised and updated edition published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2016
Distributed by Perseus Distribution
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Gumbel, Andrew, author.
Title: Down for the count : dirty elections and the rotten history of
democracy in America / Andrew Gumbel.
Other titles: Steal this vote
Description: Revised and updated edition. | New York : New Press, The, 2016.
| Revised edition of: Steal this vote. New York : Nation Books, c2005. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044836| ISBN 9781620971680 (paperback) | ISBN
9781620971697 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Elections--Corrupt practices--United States--History. |
Voting-machines--United States--History. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE /
Political Process / Elections.
Classification: LCC JK1994 .G87 2016 | DDC 324.973--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc
.gov/2015044836
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This book was set in Minion Pro and Gotham
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Not alone the triumphs and the statesmen; the defeats and
the grafters also represent us, and just as truly. Why not see
it so and say it?
—Lincoln Steffens
CONTENTS
[NO PRINT: EDITABLE FRONT MATTER TITLE] Contents
Author’s Note ix
Introduction: “Everything Is a Violation” 1
1. The Antidemocratic Tradition and the New Right 19
2. Slavery and the System 35
3. Patronage, Liquor, and Graft: The Ascent of Machine Politics 47
4. The Theft of the Century 61
5. The 1896 Watershed and the Paradox of Reform 73
6. The Long Agony of the Disenfranchised South 89
7. Chicago: The Other Kind of Mob Rule 107
8. The Fallacy of the Technological Fix 121
9. Democracy’s Frangible Connections: Florida 2000 139
10. Miracle Cure 159
11. Election 2004: The Shape of Things to Come 177
12. The 3 Percent Solution 189
13. Pope and Abbott: The New Religion of Buying and
Suppressing Votes 205
14. The Super-Rich and the Democratic Future 223
Acknowledgments 237
Notes 239
Index 277
AUTHOR’S NOTE
[NO PRINT: EDITABLE FRONT MATTER TITLE] Author’s Note
T
his is an updated and thoroughly revised version of a book that was
first published under the title Steal This Vote by Nation Books in
2005. The clamorous events of the past ten years and the extraordinary
backlash against voting rights in many parts of the country have re-
quired a shift in perspective away from the sense of puzzled incompre-
hension many Americans felt in the immediate aftermath of the 2000
election toward a more thorough contextualization of the country’s
dysfunctional electoral system, past and present.
There’s less about voting machines this time, and more about money
and the politics of voter suppression. It’s gratifying to note that many
of the judgment calls I made in the wake of the 2004 elections have
proved correct, despite much sound and fury to the contrary at the
time. Republicans weren’t in cahoots with voting- machine companies
to steal elections, as is now clear from their obvious focus on other
things— redistricting, tightening the rules for third- party registra-
tion drives, cracking down on the invented problem of in- person voter
fraud, and, as long as George W. Bush was president, aggressively po-
liticizing the Justice Department. There is a persistent and continuing
structural issue of race in the American political system; many of the
recent laws passed to restrict ballot access and suppress minority votes
have been sparked by modern versions of the Nativist impulses and ra-
cial backlash that drove voter suppression in the wake of the Civil War.
If the story of suffrage rights in Western Europe is essentially a story of
working- class empowerment and was largely settled by the end of the
