The Vote Collectors

September 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.

October 1, 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

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2021
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.

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