Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Paperback)

by John Fund (Author) "Pollster John Zogby has spent a lot of time analyzing Americans' attitudes toward our electoral system, particularly in the aftermath of the 2000 Florida fiasco..." (more)
Key Phrases: absentee ballot fraud, provisional voting, provisional ballots, Election Day, Palm Beach, South Dakota (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The Florida Fiasco of 2000, with hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court intervention, forced Americans to confront an ugly reality. The U.S. has the sloppiest election systems of any industrialized nation, so sloppy that at least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.

In "Stealing Elections," John Fund takes the reader on a national tour of voter fraud scandals ranging from rural states like Texas and Mississippi to big cities such as Philadelphia and Milwaukee. He explores dark episodes such as the way "vote brokers" stole a mayoral election in Miami in 1998 by tampering with 4700 absentee ballots. He shows how, in the aftermath of the Motor Voter Law of 1993, Californians used mail-in forms to get absentee ballots for fictitious people and pets, while in St. Louis it was discovered that voter rolls included 13,000 more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of adults in the city.

Election officials are trying to reassure voters by turning to computerized voting machines. But Fund shows that with the new technology come even greater concerns. Early in 2004, for instance, the state of Maryland, which has 16,000 new Diebold machines, commissioned a security expert to try to rig a practice election. He and his team broke into the computer at the State Board of Elections, completely changed the outcome of the election, left, and erased their electronic trail—all in under five minutes.

"Stealing Elections" gives us a chilling portrait of our electoral vulnerability--in the 2004 presidential election and on into the future. Writing with urgency and authority, John Fund shows how a lethal combination of bureaucratic bungling and ballot rigging have put our democracy at risk.

About the Author
John Fund is a member of the "Wall Street Journal"’s editorial board and writes the paper’s daily 'Political Diary.' He has written on voter fraud and election irregularities for the last decade in the "Wall Street Journal," "New Republic," "American Spectator" and other publications. In the past year, Fund has made over 90 appearances on Fox News, MSNBC, C-Span, and CNBC.

Product Details

• Paperback: 210 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (September 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594030618
• ISBN-13: 978-1594030611
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #502,526 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

70 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic! Buy this book! (Don't steal it.), September 19, 2004

By	Seth Cooper "cooper76" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is an excellent book that I highly recommend for every citizen who cares about our democracy and the integrity of the voting system through which it is repeatedly renewed. John Fund has written an important, concise work that readers will find readily accessible and informative.

I was hooked from page one, where Fund asserts that "the United States has a haphazard, fraud-prone election system benefiting an emerging Third World country rather than the world's leading democracy." Those are bold words, but in the chapters that follow Fund chronicles a rash of voter scandals from across the country-from Florida to Texas, from Missouri to South Dakota, and from Hawaii and elsewhere. The voting shenanigans pulled by many of the persons chronicled, the lax procedures and lack of serious law enforcement are particularly outrageous--if not downright SCARY.

Very intriguing was Funds reference to the "conflict of visions" concept proposed by Thomas Sowell and how those competing visions of human nature and reality provide the lenses through which competing political forces view the goals of electoral law. Seeing as this book is a compact one, Fund does not delve too deeply into the philosophical, but this reviewer (who is an admirer of "A Conflict of Visions") nonetheless appreciates this insight.

Most of the voter scandals discussed by Fund were perpetrated by Democrats (sometimes carried by Democrats battling other Democrats in local primary elections). However, Fund also points out incidents of voter fraud carried out by persons who are Republicans. Crime, including voter crime, is an equal opportunity offense. One need not be a member of a particular party to appreciate the contents of the book and the arguments presented. It should be noted that this book does not dwell upon courtroom litigation and legal arguments, particularly those involved in the 2000 Presidential election fiasco in Florida. Nor does the book spend an inordinate amount of time on the 2000 Florida mess, in general, although Fund does provide some key insights into what really happened in Florida once the dust settled, and much of it will be news to many. In any event, regardless of what may have taken place in recent times, it is of greater importance that citizens understand the voting process problems we have and the urgent need to address those problems.

Fund discusses some recent election reforms prompted by the Help Americans Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) and poses a number of suggestions near the end of this book. His advice strikes one as imminently sound. The discussion of electronic voting was very informative-showing both its merits and also chronicling some serious technical blunders. (This reviewer leans toward an electronic voting system that provides a printout paper trail.)

An experienced journalist, Fund's book is well-written and is an enjoyable read. It hits readers with first-rate reporting and solid analysis. With election season now upon us, this book is very timely, and comes highly recommended.

37 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Democracy In Peril, October 25, 2004

By	Patrick A. Hayden (Arlington, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In his brilliant, well-written, and downright frightening new book "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy", Wall Street Journal political reporter John Fund looks at how easily votes are stolen or voters disenfranchised in this country, how Florida in 2000 was just the tip of the iceberg THAN YEAR, and how virtually nothing has changed since then to prevent an even longer, drawn out leagal battle from occuring.

Fund opens his book by describing the two types of people who are concerned about threat to the integrity of elections. One group, mostly Demcorats, are primarily concerened with the most people voting as possible, the "Unconstrained" view of Democracy that deempahsizes rules governing registration and voter ID in favor of getting as many people as possible to the polls. The other, "constrained" view, held by Republicans, is that the rule of law in elections must be upheld. This came to a head in two states in particluar in 2000, Florida and Missouri. Florida's problems are well-known, and Fund effectively and convincingly demonstrates that while the largest stories about fraud focused on so-called "disenfranchised" voters, the real problem was outright fraud committed in battlegrounds like Palm Beach Co. He decontructs the myth that 1000's of lower-income and minority votes were surpressed by relying on facts and statistics, not charges that were made only in the media, not the Courts. He also demonstrates that the Media probably crushed turnout in the Florida panhandle, which operates on Central Time, by declaring the polls closed statewide while there was still and hour of voting left in the Panhandle, and then calling Florida for Gore with 12 minutes left before the polls closed in that part of the state.

In Missouri, classic, machine fraud was a problem, with the established state laws governing elections essentialled overruled on a case by case basis by judges sympathetic to Democrats. While George Bush won the state when Senator Kit Bond finally insisted the polls close 3 hours after they were supposed to, Fund demonsrates eerie coincidences that seem to indicated a pattern to defraud the vote by the national Democratic Party.

The other chapters detail the fact that by eletion stanards, America's electoral integrity is teetering dangerously close to third world banana republicanism, that Mexico has a more secure voting system than we do, and he outlines ways to ensure that the process, which he argues must be uniform, transparent, and legally enforced, can be made safe and stable again. While some on the left may not like the harsh truths detailed in the book, if you want to understand exactly what is happening to the democratic process and how to fix it before it's too late, this book is a scary but essential read.

32 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vote early, vote often, October 19, 2004

By	J. Adams "History buff" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I wish I could say I was surprised at this book, and some of the details were fairly shocking, but as a poll watcher in several states over the decades, I am only sorry that this book is not getting the attention it deserves. The voting system in the country is very broken, and getting worse every day as the rhetoric escalates and the cheaters game the system. While there have been stolen elections many times in the USA, the only recent one at the national level was JFK's election in 1960 by dead people in Chicago and ghosts in Texas. Of course you could say the Democrats are up to the same old tricks with a different twist since they did a good job of disenfranchising black voters in the South with Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, and KKK intimidation back when Senator Byrd was still wearing his white dress and hood in the 'hood. The claims by Democrats of election fraud in Florida in 2000 were proven to be false by every reputable organization that looked into it, including some very liberal newspapers who spent a lot of time doing recounts. But John Fund's little book shows numerous examples of voter fraud on a grand scale, in mostly Democratic areas, and this election will make 1960 look like petty theft. With more registered voters in some areas than there are living adults, where 40,000 New York voters from heavily Democrat districts are also registered to vote in Florida and thousands of them apparently did vote for Gore twice in 2000, and where the system is rigged to reward fraud, our election system is headed towards anarchy, if it isn't already there. With the race card played by Democrats at any attempt by Republicans to make this an honest process, we could well wind up with a president who was elected by fraud instead of by the will of the people. This is the only nation where cashing a check requires more identification than casting a vote. It is a sad day when the American soldiers who liberated Afghanistan and Iraq may well have their vote stolen while overseeing a more honest election process in those countries so new to freedom.