About this item

Down for the Count explores the tawdry history of elections in the United States - a chronicle of votes bought, stolen, suppressed, lost, miscounted, thrown into rivers, and litigated up to the U.S. Supreme Court - and uses it to explain why we are now experiencing the biggest backslide in voting rights in more than a century. This thoroughly revised edition, first published to acclaim and some controversy in 2005 as Steal This Vote, reveals why America is unique among established Western democracies in its inability to run clean, transparent elections. And it demonstrates, in crisp, clear, accessible language, how the partisan battles now raging over voter ID, out-of-control campaign spending, and minority voting rights fit into a long, largely unspoken tradition of hostility to the very notion of representative democracy.



About the Author

Andrew Gumbel

Andrew Gumbel is an award-winning journalist and author with a long track record as an investigative reporter, political columnist, magazine writer and foreign correspondent. He writes regularly for The Guardian, among other publications, on subjects ranging from politics, law enforcement and counterterrorism, to popular culture and food. His books include Oklahoma City: What The Investigation Missed -- And Why It Still Matters (HarperCollins, 2012) , Down for the Count: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America (The New Press, 2016) and the forthcoming Won't Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System (The New Press, August 2020) , which tells the remarkable story of a public university in Atlanta that has transformed the prospects of its lower-income students and upended the national conversation on higher education. He is also a co-editor and contributor to Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People (also from The New Press, 2020) , which examines the prospects for American democracy in the age of Trump.Born in Britain, Andrew spent six years with the international news agency Reuters before working for the British dailies The Guardian and The Independent. He was in Berlin when the Wall came down, in Kuwait in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, in Bosnia and Serbia during the wars of the 1990s, and in Italy to watch the political rise of Silvio Berlusconi. Since 1998 he has been based in the United States. Aside from the Guardian, his pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, The Advocate and the Hollywood news website TheWrap.In addition to his work as a writer, Andrew has developed a strong reputation as a journalism teacher. He received a first class honors degree in French and Italian literature from Oxford University. He lives in Los Angeles.Some beautifully written books Andrew has read (in some cases reread) and enjoyed recently:The Lost, by Daniel MendelsohnShe Said, by Jodi Kantor and Megan TwoheyAsk Again, Yes, by Mary Beth KeaneAn Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America, by Andrew YoungThe Fire Next Time, by James BaldwinEducated, by Tara WestoverTimequake, by Kurt VonnegutThe Relive Box, by T.C. BoyleThe Deer Farm, by Dean Kuipers



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