Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008

by Joan Brunwasser

Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, edited by Mark Crispin Miller

Warning: This book will make you uncomfortable. Mark Crispin Miller pulls no punches. He's happy to spread the blame around – politicians, the Religious Right, corporate interests, election officials, the corporate media, voting machine vendors, fanatics for whom victory is all that matters – all (and more) come in for legitimate criticism. The biggest villains of the piece are those in the GOP who seek nothing less than a permanent power grab and have a grand plan in place to pull it off. Miller described the plan in his previous book:

And right now, as we dawdle, Bush’s party and the movement that it serves are busily advancing measures to consolidate their “victory” by making fair elections more unlikely…The point of all such stealthy actions is to rein in, control and thus in essence terminate American democracy – a plan that we believers in American democracy can foil, but only if we acknowledge that that plan is in the works, and that it made great progress in 2004. (Fooled Again, The Real Case for Electoral Reform, p. xvii)

Miller has been diagnosing our electoral ills longer than almost anyone. Over the last few years, he has been continually fine-tuning his message – with Fooled Again, then its expanded and updated version, and now Loser Take All. Miller is meticulous; his analysis is clear, taking the time to connect the dots in a way that is hard to refute by weaving together the chapters of investigative journalists, election experts, and activists. Two highlights from a stellar group: David Moore’s “Because Jeb said so: What really happened on Election Night in Florida” starts the collection off with a bang. And in “Election 2004: The Urban Legend,” Michael Collins persuasively dismantles the traditional GOP explanation for all their gains. The book bristles with statistics, graphs, and charts, but is not too technical for the average, concerned citizen.

The clock is ticking. Our heel-dragging – borne of naïveté, misplaced idealism, or denial – makes us enablers in our own doom. As Jonathan Simon and Bruce O’Dell explain in “Landslide Denied,” the truth endangers the way we see ourselves, both as individuals and as a nation. Ironically, in our never-ending war on terror, we have less to fear from outsiders than we do from the enemies within. Like a flesh-eating disease that consumes its host, the anti-democratic forces are a poison quietly and stealthily diffusing throughout the body politic.

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