The North Carolina State Board of Elections, newly constituted by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, will hold hearings on alleged election fraud in the state’s 9th Congressional District beginning Monday February 18. The hearing is scheduled through Wednesday and will begin with a presentation of the allegations by the Board’s professional staff of investigators and attorneys.
Documents related to the hearing are posted on the Board’s website here. A portal should also be available during the hearing to call in and listen to the proceedings but it has not been posted yet.
The new board, after a long bout of wrangling over Gov. Cooper’s authority by the Republican legislature, has five members: three Democrats and two Republicans. Each county board will consist of five members with the same mix from both parties.
The 9th District race for U.S. House, which spans counties south of Charlotte, pitts Democrat Dan McCready against Republican Mark Harris. Harris defeated incumbent Republican Robert Pittenger in the 2018 primary to win the right to challenge McCready, who won his primary handily.
Harris is a Baptist minister who holds a doctorate of ministry from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. McCready is a successful businessman and Iraq war veteran. McCready, under pressure from a conservative electorate, promised not to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker. His position on this now is moot, and it is unclear what his alliances will be if he gets to the House.
Harris’s conservative, religious-based views included supporting the “bathroom bill” and a bill against same-sex marriage. He is solidly in the Southern right-wing tradition of a male dominated culture, anti-Muslim (even hostile to Islam) and hostility to a woman’s right to choose.
The allegations of voter fraud in the 9th District congressional race center on Bladen County, and to some extent Robeson County, and a man hired by Harris to get out the vote named Leslie Mcrae Dowless, Jr., who was convicted of insurance fraud in 1992 and served six months of a two year sentence.
While the primary race was never protested by Pittenger, there is evidence that Dowless helped Harris win that race through questionable and possibly illegal tampering of absentee ballots.
Dowless has been lurking around politics in the 9th District for many years and has a reputation for manipulating absentee ballots to favor his clients and suppress votes. Make no mistake: the state Board of Elections believes the number of ballots manipulated total more than the number of votes Harris carried over McCready, 905 votes.
The allegations not only involve Dowless and Harris, they also implicate the Bladen County Board of Elections who allegedly helped Dowless target his ballot harvesting activities by supplying him with inside information possessed by the Board. This is one reason the new State Board of Elections refused to seat a new county election board in Bladen.
How did Dowless’s scheme work? He hired people to go out and collect absentee ballots, and while collecting them, told his workers to advocate for Harris. If the voter marked Harris’s name on the ballot, Dowless received it and the county counted it. If the voter chose McCready, it is alleged, then those ballots got lost and were never counted. Dowless did this hundreds of times.
While Harris must have suspected that Dowless was doing this for him, McCready seems to have had no idea this was going on and actually conceded the election to Harris at first.
My understanding is the state Board has two options. It can call for a new election or certify Harris the winner. To call for a new election requires at least a 4-1 vote. A prior board made up of as many Democrats as Repubicans voted twice in November and December – unanimously – not to certify the Harris/McCready race. This should give you an understanding of the evidence the state Board must possess incriminating Harris and Dowless.
Should the state board not be able to reach a decision for a new election, and if the facts borne out at hearing require one, then the U.S. House of Representatives has already said it will step in and call for new elections, which could include new primaries. It is certain that the House will never seat Harris absent a new election declaring him the winner. But…as of now, with Harris fully implicated, I don’t see how he could ever legitimately be sworn in.
What do state Republicans think about all this? They think the hearings are unfair, have called for Harris to be certified, and are pulling out all the legal stops they can to stop McCready from getting a new election. But they’re up against a mountain of evidence. Dowless is also under a possible criminal charge because the state Board has referred his illegalities to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
With three days of hearings scheduled, a full airing will finally come to light. It’s possible many of the witnesses, including Dowless, will refuse to testify. But two of his workers have already made statements to investigators that what they did was wrong. At the very least, they illegally turned in absentee ballots because the law states only close relatives can assist in taking the ballots to the county board.
This in and of itself should be enough to overturn an election tainted by fraud.