Stealing Our Democracy

In a searing political memoir, former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman explodes the myth of an impartial U.S. justice system. He should know. Arguably the most successful and promising politician in modern Alabama history, his three-decade career in public service ran afoul of Republican opponents who used the federal judicial system to take him out of contention in Alabama and nationally. Siegelman ultimately was sentenced to 88 months in federal prison and served five years, with long stretches in solitary confinement during which he was a literal political prisoner, cut off from interviews and outside contact. Stealing Our Democracy reveals how Siegelman’s enemies — including politicized prosecutors and a corrupt judge — stripped him of his freedom, his career, and his law license, and deprived him of his family and friends. His is an intensely personal account of how our system can fail and be abused for political greed. And if it could happen to him, he writes, it can happen to any of us, particularly in an era when Donald Trump is abusing his power and using the Department of Justice as a political weapon to defend himself and to destroy those who oppose him. Siegelman draws on his experience as a public servant and an inmate to show why the nation’s prisons must be reformed along with our system of indictment, prosecution, and sentencing. Finally, Stealing Our Democracy offers a blueprint for voters in 2020 of what must be done to preserve democracy.

John Fund explores the real divide the country faces with the looming election. Through wary thoughts on voting integrity, he shows how eletions can be decided by the votes of dead people, illegal felon voters, and absentee voters that simply don't exist. If nothing is done to address the growing cynicism about vote counting, rest assured that another close presidential election that descends into bitter partisan wrangling is just around the corner.

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was the most successful and promising politician in modern Alabama history, that is until Siegelman's enemies dragged him into court with biased prosecutors and a corrupt judge. Rather than meet his potential, Governor Siegelman was sentenced to eighty-eight months, locked away as a political prisoner. In Stealing Our Democracy, Siegelman tells his side of the story, a story with damning implications for anyone who believes that democracy and the criminal justice system cannot be exploited for political gain.

Overton uses real-life stories to show how seemingly insignificant factors--such as how many booths are at polling sites and how district boundaries are drawn--channel political power and determine policies on war, schools, clean air, and other life-affecting issues.

“A gripping ground-level narrative…a marvel of reporting: tightly wound… but also panoramic.”—Washington Post “A lean, fast-paced and important account of the chaotic final weeks.”—New York Times In The Steal, veteran journalists Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague offer a week-by-week, state-by-state account of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In the sixty-four days between November 3 and January 6, President Donald Trump and his allies fought to reverse the outcome of the vote. Focusing on six states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—Trump’s supporters claimed widespread voter fraud. Caught up in this effort were scores of activists, lawyers, judges, and state and local officials. Working with a team of researchers and reporters, Bowden and Teague uncover never-before-told accounts from the election officials fighting to do their jobs amid outlandish claims and threats to themselves, their colleagues, and their families. The Steal is an engaging, in-depth report on what happened during those crucial nine weeks and a portrait of the dedicated individuals who did their duty and stood firm against the unprecedented, sustained attack on our election system and ensured that every legal vote was counted and that the will of the people prevailed.

This book uses eleven recent California initiatives and referendums to provide readers with a set of analytical tools and examples that will help them better understand real politics. It clarifies the public consequences, and studies the great variations of what happens to initiatives that win on Election Day and withstand judicial review. Research is presented in an effective and efficient manner, along with key factors that lead policy actors to implement and enforce initiatives and referendums fully, partially, and not at all--a social phenomenon that affects our lives in fundamental ways. A wide range of policy areas cover tobacco tax, transportation, legislative spending provision, term limits provision, open primaries, and bilingual education. This book also includes varied conclusions about how to reform the initiative process to improve direct democracy. For citizens who want to understand and/or increase their role in government.

A close presidential election in November could well come down to contested states or even districts--an election decided by vote theft? It could happen this year. Based on Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s investigative reporting for Rolling Stone and BBC television, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps might be the most important book published this year--one that could save the election. Billionaires & Ballot Bandits names the filthy-rich sugar-daddies who are super-funding the Super-PACs of both parties--billionaires with nicknames like "The Ice Man," "The Vulture" and, of course, The Brothers Koch. Told with Palast's no-holds-barred, reporter-on-the-beat style, the facts as he lays them out are staggering. What emerges in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits is the never-before-told-story of the epic battle being fought behind the scenes between the old money banking sector that still supports Obama, and the new hedge fund billionaires like Paul Singer who not only support Romney but also are among his key economic advisors. Although it has not been reported, Obama has shown some backbone in standing up to the financial excesses of the men behind Romney. Billionaires & Ballot Bandits exposes the previously unreported details on how operatives plan to use the hundreds of millions in Super-PAC money pouring into this election. We know the money is pouring in, but Palast shows us the convoluted ways the money will be used to suppress your vote. The story of the billionaires and why they want to buy an election is matched with the nine ways they can steal the election. His story of the sophisticated new trickery will pick up on Palast's giant New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

This book gives us a chilling portrait of our electoral vulnerability. Written with urgency and authority.

The 2000 presidential election meltdown and the more recent controversy about computer voting machines did not come out of the blue. Steal This Vote tells the fraught but very colorful history of electoral malfeasance in the United States. It is a tale of votes bought, stolen, suppressed, lost, cast more than once, assigned to dead people and pets, miscounted, thrown into rivers, and litigated all the way to the Supreme Court. (No wonder America has the lowest voter participation rate of any Western democracy!) Andrew Gumbel—whose work on the new electronic voting fraud has been praised by Gore Vidal and Paul Krugman, and has won a Project Censored Award—shows that, for all the idealism about American democracy, free and fair elections have been the exception, not the rule. In fact, Gumbel suggests that Tammany Hall, shrouded as it is in moral odium, might have been a fairer system than we have today, because ostensibly positive developments like the secret ballot have been used to squash voting rights ever since.

Jay Sekulow—one of America’s most influential attorneys—explores a post Obama landscape where bureaucracy has taken over our government and provides a practical roadmap to help take back our personal liberties. Jay Sekulow is on a mission to defend Americans’ freedom. The fact is that freedom is under attack like never before. The threat comes from the fourth branch of government—the biggest branch—and the only branch not in the Constitution: the federal bureaucracy. The bureaucracy imposes thousands of new laws every year, without a single vote from Congress. The bureaucracy violates the rights of Americans without accountability—persecuting adoptive parents, denying veterans quality healthcare, discriminating against conservatives and Christians for partisan purposes, and damaging our economy with job-killing rules. Americans are bullied by the very institutions established to protect their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our nation’s bureaucrats are on an undemocratic power trip. But Sekulow has a plan to fight back. We can resist illegal abuse, we can reform a broken system, and we can restore American democracy. This book won’t just tell you how to win, it will show you real victories achieved by Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice. Unless we can roll back the fourth branch of govern­ment—the most dangerous branch—our elections will no longer matter. Undemocratic is a wake-up call, a call made at just the right time—before it’s too late to save the democracy we love.