Reading John Grisham's new book The Biloxi Boys. I'm about 1/3 of the way through and I'm finding it really dry. Almost like a legal brief or a textbook. Just matter of fact. This happened. That happened. Very straightforward and direct. It's not that I don't like the book but it's only keeping my interest because I know the area he's writing about and it's a reasonably accurate history of the area that became Mississippi's casino strip.
One of the things I found of particular interest was his description of small town politics and how elections were manipulated. Holding ballot boxes from certain sections of the community until the number of votes required to win was ascertained. Then magically pulling that same number from the delayed boxes. Duffel bags of ballots waiting to be counted in the middle of the night. Ferrying voters to and from the polls, bribing them along the way. Funny. Those are the same tactics now employed on a national scale. Nothing has really changed since the 60s, other than the scope of the cheating.
That took me back to a political science class I took at Mississippi State.
Sidebar: We were asked to write a paper profiling a controversial politician. I chose George Corley Wallace, used my own personal experiences and everything I knew from growing up in the Alabama he helped create. Good and bad. Professor said I should take the 10 pages I turned in, flesh it out with interviews of people who were still alive and write a book. Within a year, some other guy beat me to it. The world isn't big enough for two comprehensive biographies of GCW. So that's another book out there languishing in my files.
Back to the class: We had a guest speaker one day. Mississippi politician. Slick black guy. He told us how he won elections and it was shocking.
> They bribed homeless people with food and alcohol. Caravans of small buses picking people up, showing them how to fill out the ballot, taking them to polling places.
> Scan the voter rolls for people who had died. Take the same homeless people around to multiple polling places and have them vote as dead people in each one.
> Flood absentee ballots where they could
> Take boxes of ballots to the churches with direction on how to make sure they were filled out and returned
> Bribe a handful of poll workers to look the other way when stacks of ballots were smuggled in
The dude described this massive fraud with smug satisfaction. I was the only one who questioned it. I think mostly because I was older than the other students. He bristled and kind of snapped "that's the way it's done. You want to get elected, that's what you do."
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