I just had a chance to read The Vote Collectors, by journalists Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner. I found it unsatisfying and I want to write a bit about why.

About two thirds of the book is an examination of alleged election fraud by McCrae Dowless and others in Bladen County and surrounding areas during the 2016 and 2018 elections. It also deals a fair bit with the Bladen County Improvement Association (also the subject of a recent podcast series by Serial’s Zoe Chace). The middle of the book gives earlier history about early voting disputes in North Carolina, with an emphasis on terrible acts of race discrimination and violence against African-Americans. (That second part seems weirdly out of place in the rest of the book.)

I was interested in reading the book because these authors had exclusive access to interview McCrae Dowless, who was at the center of the illegal ballot collection scheme (and is awaiting trial on voter fraud charges for both the 2016 and 2018 races; he was sentenced to six months for social security fraud for not reporting his income as a political consultant ). It’s clear from reading the book that Dowless ingratiated himself with the authors.

In the end, the authors offer no new insights on whether Dowless engaged in illegal activity (“Were ballots taken from voters illegally in Bladen County in 2018. Yes, we know that some low-level workers took ballots. Was McCrae Dowless actively and knowingly directing them to do that? We don’t know. He swears not. The best evidence to support it is in the words of people like Lisa Britt and others who have a history of drug abuse and other criminal offenses and who’d have reasons to give investigators what investigators hope to find.”). It strains credulity to believe that the desperate workers Dowless hired, often for things like gas money, collected ballots not at his direction.

The book also does not really explain how prevalent such schemes are in Bladen County (it discusses allegations that the Improvement Association engaged in similar conduct, but doesn’t offer its own evaluation of such evidence or bring new evidence) or in other counties (there is innunendo about problems in other counties, but nothing solid is offered). That of course matters for the bigger questions about election fraud in the U.S. (My sense, as I wrote in Election Meltdown, is that such schemes are quite rare, but most likely to happen in poor, rural areas where press coverage and oversight are scarce.)

In the end, the book is fodder for whatever people want it to be—that fraud can happen, and maybe it happens on a broad scale, but no one knows anything. I think the book will be used both in an attempt to exonerate Dowless and to make the claim that such fraud is so hard to find that therefore we need to make voting harder to stop even the risk of such fraud.