Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols

The Election Integrity Movement's Rise and Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, 2000-2008

by Marta Steele

Without democracy, America is just a bunch of bloated rest steps on a spider web of highways.

And that's the way they want it."They" being that 1% that don't want your vote to get in the way of their dash to the cash.

No one steals votes to win elections.Votes are stolen because they are worth their weight in gold and then some. The reason elections are jacked is to make sure those who are rich get richer.

And that's what makes Steele's book like perfect teeth: astonishingly bright with a great big bite.

Marta Steele's grok'd it.Vote theft is class war by other means.

What Steele does here is give you the where, when and how.A car is found at the bottom of a Florida swamp with 1500 ballots marked for Al Gore. In a hot race in North Dakota, Native americans (8-to-1 Democrats) couldn't vote without showing ID, which few had.It doesn't matter that the state doesn't require photo ID.And so on ad nauseam.

Here is the masterwork on every way that the scoundrel class shred and savage our right to vote.

And not just a few votes and registrations sink into the swamp. It's millions. And, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it's the votes and registrations of poor, Black, and Hispanic voters.

Most of these voters are Democrats, but Steele is not partisan in the least. Indeed, she shows that while America's dispossessed seek shelter in the Democratic Party, they are still kept in the back of the ballot protection bus.(Unlike Republicans, when Democrats hold $38,000 a plate dinners, they let the poor lick the plates.) I particularly enjoyed her basting Al Gore and his crew for not protecting the least among us.

While Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols has the heft and footnotes of an academic treatise, it's a fun read.Suggestion: take a double of Felipe II with you into this zoo of miscreants, and savor the dark humor of one method of vote heist after another.

Here is the line-up of ballot burglars who think democracy is a safe to be cracked.

Bless Marta Steele for setting off the burglar alarm.

Greg Palast

Author of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits:How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps (2012), Vultures Picnic (2011), and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2004).www.BallotBandits.org

About the Author

Marta Steele is a grassroots writer and journalist as well as academic book and journal editor. Her educational background is in classical antiquity and linguistics. A graduate of Wellesley College (BA) and UCLA (MA), she has taught English, rhetoric, ancient Greek, and Latin at the college level. She has also worked full-time as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor. As an activist, she has focused on peace, interfaith issues, and election integrity. She resides in Washington, DC, just hours away from her daughter Liza, a PhD candidate in sociology at Princeton University.

337 Pages plus accompanying CD

ISBN: 978-1-62249-026-4