Excerpt: How to Steal an Election

[Editor's Note: This is an edited excerpt from Steal This Vote by Andrew Gumbel, published by Nation Books.]

If you do everything, you'll win. -- Lyndon Johnson

A few days before the November 2004 election, Jimmy Carter was asked what would happen if, instead of flying to Zambia or Venezuela or East Timor, his widely respected international election monitoring team was invited to turn its attention to the United States. His answer was stunningly blunt. Not only would the voting system be regarded as a failure, he said, but the shortcomings were so egregious the Carter Center would never agree to monitor an election there in the first place. "We wouldn't think of it," the former president told a radio interviewer. "The American political system wouldn't measure up to any sort of international standards, for several reasons."

What, after all, was to be done with a country whose newest voting machines, unlike Venezuela's, couldn't even perform recounts? A country where candidates, in contrast to the more promising emerging democracies of the Caucasus or the Balkans, were denied equal, unpaid access to the media? There were a number of reasons, in the sharply partisan atmosphere surrounding the Bush-Kerry race, to wonder whether campaign conditions didn't smack more of the Third World than the First. Every day, newspapers recounted stories of registration forms being found in garbage cans, or of voter rolls padded with the names of noncitizens, fictional characters, household pets, and the dearly departed. The Chicago Tribune, a paper that knows its voter fraud, having won a Pulitzer for its work on the infamous Daley machine, found 181,000 dead people on the registration lists of six key battleground states.

Bush opponents were all too inclined to believe, in fact, that the Republicans were about to steal the presidency, just as they believed it had been stolen the last time. The Republicans, for their part, laughed this off as conspiratorial nonsense, but they also weren't shy about announcing how hard or how dirtily they were prepared to fight if it came down to another Florida-style tug-of-war. Long Island's GOP congressman Pete King, caught on camera by the documentary maker Alexandra Pelosi during a White House function on election day, bragged even as the first polls were closing that Bush had already won. When Pelosi asked him how he knew, he answered, perhaps jokingly, perhaps not: "It's all over but the counting. And we'll take care of the counting."

Election day itself, at least in the battleground states, was a deeply jarring experience for America's trusting majority, which had led itself to believe that all was for the best in the best of all possible democracies. Everyone bristled with suspicion and mutual mistrust. The Republicans accused the Democrats of trying to sneak ineligible voters to the polls and threatened to deploy official challengers to sniff out the mischief -- something much discussed ahead of time but that ultimately failed to materialize on any scale, perhaps because of a flurry of negative publicity stirred up on the eve of the election.

The Democrats, meanwhile, could barely keep up with their own seemingly endless list of grievances. Across the country, voters in urban, heavily African American precincts complained their polling places had far too few voting machines to accommodate the crowds, creating lines as long as seven or eight hours toward the end of the day and deterring an unknown number of voters. In suburban Cincinnati, observers erupted in fury when they and the media were thrown out of county election headquarters for the duration of the vote count. They were told there had been a terrorist threat, but the FBI later denied all knowledge of it.