Well-Greased Machines

...With so much on the line," Campbell writes, "the players inside the parties—and well beyond view of the networks' cameras—manipulated the election to their own benefit...

...So is his tale about the "toughs"— New York's Whigs imported from Philadelphia to intimidate Democratic voters during the 1838 elections...

...The crucial lesson of Florida was not so much about perfidy...

...Southerners of a certain age also know exactly why blacks never seemed to show much interest in voting until the mid-1960s...

...into moderates on most racial issues...

...Had she thought of it, she might have added that the tax also kept Cherokee County's abundant population of dirtpoor white people away from the polls on election day...

...As Tracy Campbell explains in Deliver the Vote, poll taxes let Southern grandees control their political realms without resorting to bloody methods they might otherwise have deemed necessary...

...Finally, in the late 1950s, I asked my mother what they were...

...What became apparent only afterward was that even though the 2000 election had not seen bands of thugs roaming neighborhoods or gangs of 'repeaters,' the election nonetheless displayed how the culture of corruption operated behind the scenes in American politics...

...They know the legend of John F. Kennedy, who possibly was elevated to the Oval Office by one man in particular, Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago...

...Nevertheless, we have come a long way from the days when ballots were not secret, when votes were bought, and when thugs stood watch to threaten voters whose politics they disliked...

...Under intense pressure from the Republicans," the Times wrote, "Florida officials accepted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state laws...

...Since the 1960s, the American electorate has been segmented into easily identifiable groups that claim clear political agendas and preferences...

...The Times addressed the question explicitly in its examination of Florida's absentee ballot process...

...and Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C...

...And he successfully demonstrates it is as much a part of America's history as the packed immigrant neighborhoods ofNew York or the cotton fields of the Deep South by offering up a long list of detailed cases...

...It is not news...

...But there is such a thing as too much detail...

...Americans may have wanted a sacrosanct process, but I think a majority of them always knew it wasn't—at least not everywhere...

...The past is never entirely dead in American life, but it is obvious that Americans have grown progressively better over the centuries at running a vibrant democracy...

...Campbell seems a little too invested in the idea of election fraud as an American tradition since 1742, when his narrative begins, to admit that comparatively the playing field is now much more level...

...In particular, while some voters admitted in interviews that they had cast illegal ballots after election day, the investigation found no support for the suspicions of Democrats that the Bush campaign had organized an effort to solicit late votes...

...That is better than you can say for some contests in our history...

...Most important, they ensured that African Americans would never again be forced to live within their own nation as if they were thoroughly invisible...

...Bush, particularly those with a high concentration of military voters, while seeking to disqualify overseas ballots in counties won by Vice President Al Gore...

...His book's central point is that voter fraud has from the very start of our democracy been a corrosive force, ever threatening to render meaningless the idea of government by the people and for the people...

...As the New York Times later said in an exhaustive report, "Their goal was simple: to count the maximum number of overseas ballots in counties won by Mr...

...The strategy worked...

...When Campbell recounts the blow-by-blow electoral travails of a St...

...Worse, he writes as if he truly believes that until the Florida Presidential mess in 2000, most Americans regarded their electoral process as sacrosanct—as if the system's vulnerability to chicanery is news...

...But I think Campbell overstates his case when he suggests the bizarre 2000 election illustrates how the "culture of corruption" operates to this day behind the scenes in American politics...

...I'm sure more elections than we would like to imagine are stolen every year...

...It was more about sloppiness on the part of election officials...

...Campbell's account of Tammany Hall and its inventive use of "repeaters"—men employed to vote multiple times—is engaging...

...Fans of Presidential history know well the story of "Landslide Lyndon" B. Johnson and his highly suspect rise to the Senate in 1948...

...We have not yet made this business foolproof...

...Louis working to build its Gateway Arch, or of a Louisville, Kentucky, struggling to hold an honest municipal contest, tedium begins to build...

...Speaking of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he says: "A dawn of a new democratic day had seemingly arrived in the United States, as millions of previously disfranchised Americans gained their right to vote...

...Eleven paragraphs into its story, it said it had "found no evidence of vote fraud by either party...

...But looking back at our long and inglorious history, we do have some surprisingly strong reasons for optimism...

...Not only did they allow blacks to use their constitutional franchise, they let minorities become active players in the nation's electoral system...

...Campbell notes that Bush's eventual margin of victory came from late overseas absentee votes...

...This was not an election that was stolen blithely out of the hands of the American people...

...That is because the postelection game was never about embracing a fair way to determine a winner...

...A Republican relegated to a life in the singleparty Democratic South, she did not mince words: "It's a tax the Democrats use to prevent blacks from voting," she said...

...Nor was it much of a secret that in states like Texas the poll tax was quietly efficient, while in other parts of the South violence guaranteed election day outcomes the white ruling class wanted...

...If no overt criminal acts took place in this phase, the game was still one the lords of Tammany might have recognized and relished...

...Then he hastens to add: "In other ways, however, changes in American politics have made vote-cheating easier...

...The changes ultimately allowed for the election of hundreds of black officials throughout the South...

...At times Campbell seems so engrossed in reciting the mundane means of stealing elections that he gives short shrift to some of the profound advances in American civic life...

...By the 1970s those reforms had turned virulent racists like Senators Herman Talmadge (D.-Ga...

...And he concludes: "By fragmenting the electorate into groups with predictable voting behaviors, the parties have an easi- t er job identifying those who will likely vote for and against them, which make vote buying and vote-suppression much easier tasks...

...His story of how popular sovereignty was hijacked and used to create a proslavery Kansas in the 1850s reminds us that balloting fraud can produce evil outcomes far beyond simple unfairness...

...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Columnist, "Newsday" They would appear every summer, pinned to the bulletin board alongside the telephone in our East Texas kitchen—official-looking papers with a boldface label proclaiming: "Poll Tax Receipt...

...Like many another political machine unhappy with the way the count is going, the Bush team on the morning after the election looked toward the absentee ballots flowing into Florida from abroad...

...it was always a game of "count until you win...

...In any event, the reality is that the act, the demise of the poll tax and other major developments in the 1960s revolutionized politics in much of America...

...It is difficultto tell whether Campbell is implying that the dangers of interest group politics are somehow a commensurate negative counterbalance to the reforms of the Voting Rights Act...

...I had just received my first lesson in practical American politics...

...But as Deliver the Vote shows, postelection maneuvering can be a substantial problem...

...Politics being politics, I'm sure the temptations that lead to voter fraud continue to flourish in thousands of precincts and in hundreds of well-greased political machines throughout America...

...While most reporters covering the 2000 Florida Presidential recount were fixated on hanging and dimpled chads, for example, George W. Bush's people instantly grasped the importance of absentee ballots and used that knowledge to their advantage...

...It was more about an effective game plan on the part of the Bush team...