Early and often: how to avoid butterfly ballots, long lines, and pregnant chads.

• Author: Keisling, Phil
• Position: Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America - Book Review

Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America

By Andrew Gumbel Nation Books: $15.95

Every Election Day brings a few constants: long lines, last-minute campaigning, and complaints by both political parties that the other is trying to steal the race. The nature of these accusations breaks down along party lines. Republicans whisper that Democrats are plotting to manufacture wins through fraud; meanwhile, Democrats warn that Republicans are intimidating voters and using other nefarious means to suppress votes. The charges have only heated up since 2000, when the contested presidential election gave the country an illuminating and disturbing peek behind the curtain of our electoral system.

With the average seventh-grader at least familiar with the term "pregnant chads," election reform is no longer the province of secretaries of state or the occasional academic conference. The issues of how voters are qualified, and how ballots are cast and counted, have received far more public scrutiny in the past half-decade than they did during the previous half-century. And yet the lack of one uniform election system--each state, county, and locality has different rules about how it conducts elections--means that there are literally thousands of voting systems to understand, making it even more difficult to evaluate accusations about failures to protect against voting fraud and suppression.

Into this maze of rules and procedures comes Andrew Gumbel's Steal This Vote, a comprehensive and readable exploration of the American election process. Gumbel, a U.S.-based correspondent for the Independent of London, has taken the time to visit the county courthouses and elections offices where ballots are actually collected and counted, and he supplements his observations with historical tales of electoral scandal. These include Lyndon Johnson's 1948 Senate election, in which the infamous Ballot Box 13 contained the names of 200 voters, all of whom appeared to have voted after the polls closed, in precise alphabetical order. Joining that ignoble page in American history is the Hayes-Tilden presidential election of 1876--Rutherford Hayes lost the popular vote but ultimately triumphed over Samuel Tilden in the Electoral College by a margin of 185 to 184. (The late William Rehnquist, whose Supreme Court opinion installed George W. Bush as president, published a book in 2004 that vigorously praised and defended both the process and the outcome of the 1876 election--a decidedly minority view.)

Gumbel is a breezy, confident writer who takes his subject seriously. So it is frustrating to arrive at the end of his book--after he has documented the various flaws in our electoral system and the many possibilities for fraud and vote suppression--only to have him throw up his hands in despair. To hear Gumbel tell it, the United States is doomed to resort to a sort of arms race, a system of mutual deterrence between...