We’ve just completed day three of the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ hearing to decide whether to certify Mark Harris (R) as the winner over Dan McCready (D) in NC-09 despite compelling evidence of election fraud bought and paid for by the Harris campaign. Harris is pictured above, in an NCGOP-issued meme I couldn’t resist adding two lines of text to before re-tweeting that same evening.
For me it’s been three days of rapt attention to the most amazing political drama I’ve ever witnessed in a long lifetime of attending hearings like this one. My hemorrhoids and my back are killing me after three 8-hour days in an uncomfortable chair, staring slack-jawed in stunned silence, but the experience has been well worth the pain.
Here are the highlights of what we’ve learned so far:
On Day 1, star witness Lisa Britt testified under oath, admitting to going door-to-door in poor, rural Bladen County to collect voters’ absentee-by-mail ballots (a felony in North Carolina), in many cases ‘helping’ the voters by taking their ballots home with her and there filling in votes in the contests they left blank. Britt is the “ex-stepdaughter” of previously-convicted fraudster and gen-u-wine North Carolina backwoods good ol’ boy, McCrae Dowless, whom the Harris campaign admits it hired to perform “GOTV” activities in Bladen County. Britt testifies to receiving $3 from Dowless for every ballot she harvested. She also admits to having herself voted in 2018, despite being a convicted felon (‘for pills”) currently on probation (itself a felony here in North Carolina).
What we didn’t learn on Day 1 was what McCrae Dowless has to say for himself. He was subpoenaed to appear, but was released from subpoena before taking the stand (specifically because North Carolina law would grant him immunity if he testified before the State Board under subpoena). Over the objections of the Democratic Party’s blockbuster attorney, Marc Elias (representing Democratic candidate McCready) Dowless then refused to take the stand and went home.
Day 2 mostly centered around the testimony of Andy Yates, “CEO” of the one-man political consulting firm, Red Dome Group, which provided campaign management services to the Harris campaign. We learned that Harris hired Dowless for GOTV services in Bladen County shortly before Red Dome came onboard the campaign, and Harris then transferred management and payment of Dowless to Red Dome — thus keeping the fraudster at arm’s length from Harris himself. Accounting records reveal that Red Dome paid Dowless over $130,000 for his efforts for the Harris campaign. Boy-howdy that’s a lot of money in backwoods North Carolina. It’s also about 5% of Harris’s entire campaign budget.
We also learned that Red Dome neither collected nor retained any records of Dowless’s activities. Dowless, a contractor, was under no written contract, with no statement of work to be performed. He was reimbursed for expenses by Red Dome without being required to present any receipts. Red Dome had no record of how many people Dowless employed to work doors for Harris, nor how many hours they worked (despite reimbursing Dowless by the person-hour). It never supervised his work in any way...all of which led me to tweet:
Day 3, just completed, has been the most shocking of all. In a surprise appearance John Harris took the stand. He is the son of Republican candidate Mark Harris, and an attorney with the US Dept. of Justice. Under oath, Harris Jr. revealed that just prior to Harris Sr. hiring Dowless he (Harris Jr.) strongly advised his father that Dowless’s operation looked shady and probably involved illegal ballot harvesting, but Harris Sr. went ahead and hired Dowless anyway. I seldom feel any sympathy for lying, cheating Republicans, but I was almost touched watching Harris Sr. sobbing pathetically as his own son testified, obviously reluctantly (yet forthrightly), against him.
Tomorrow should be the final (and most dramatic) day of this amazing shit-show, with Mark Harris himself taking the stand. Personally, I look for Harris (a Baptist preacher) to publicly ask God for forgiveness. But he’ll find none from the 3-Dem : 2-Rep Board of Elections, which will vote 3-to-2 against certifying his victory in NC-09. Following that a second vote, by a similar 3-to-2 margin, will fail to order a new election (North Carolina law requires a 4-vote supermajority to order a new election). That will throw the whole mess into the lap of the U.S. House of Representatives, which will refuse to seat Harris and itself order a new election. That, in turn, will trigger a GOP-filed lawsuit seeking a new primary (to enable the GOP to cut loose Harris, who is now a dead man walking even here in morally challenged North Carolina).
Day 4 coverage begins at 9 AM, livestreamed on the WRAL.com web site. By all means check it out.
We know, from some of the attorneys’ comments, that a separate criminal investigation is also underway, but it remains under wraps at this time so we know nothing specific about it. Once it decloaks I look for McCrae Dowless to do some more hard time (he was previously convicted of insurance fraud for taking out a life insurance policy on a dead man and then attempting to collect on it). Whether Harris will also end up with a felony conviction for election fraud remains uncertain (to me, anyway). North Carolina is, after all, Chinatown.