Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count. This item is unavailable.Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count

David Daley's "extraordinarily timely" (The New York Times Book Review) account uncovers the fundamental rigging of our House of Representatives and state legislatures nationwide.

With Barack Obama's historic election in 2008, pundits proclaimed the Republicans as dead as the Whigs of yesteryear. Yet even as Democrats swooned, a small cadre of Republican operatives, including Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie and Chris Jankowski began plotting their comeback with a simple yet ingenious plan. These men had devised a way to take a tradition of dirty tricks known to political insiders as "ratf**king" to a whole new, unprecedented level. Flooding state races with a gold rush of dark money made possible by Citizens United, the Republicans reshaped state legislatures, where the power to redistrict is held.

Reconstructing this previously untold story, David Daley examines the far-reaching effects of this so-called REDMAP programme, which has radically altered America's electoral map and created a firewall in the House, insulating the party and its wealthy donors from popular democracy. Ratf**ked pulls back the curtain on one of the greatest heists in American political history.

David Daley is the editor in chief of Salon and the Digital Media Fellow for the Wilson Center for Humanities and the Arts and the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.