L. McCrae Dowless ran an operation that, despite his checkered past, drew little scrutiny — until he ended up in the middle of an election marred by fraud charges
BLADENBORO, N. C. — Adam Delane Thompson wanted to vote but was not sure what to do with the absentee ballots he received in the mail this year for him, his fiancée and his daughter. So for guidance he called an old friend in Bladenboro, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., a low-level local official with a criminal record who nonetheless had once been feted as “guru of elections” in Bladen County.
Mr. Dowless soon had the sealed ballots in his hands and was off to the post office to mail them, Mr. Thompson said.
Mr. Thompson, who works in the maintenance department at a DuPont plant, said in an interview he was grateful. But the act was apparently illegal in North Carolina, where, except in limited circumstances, it is a felony to collect another person’s absentee ballot.
In this rural region near the state’s southern border, where candidates are often intimately known as neighbors, friends or enemies, Mr. Dowless ran a do-it-all vote facilitating business that was part of the community fabric.
While cash-driven voter turnout efforts are a cottage industry in campaign seasons, Mr. Dowless’s operation appeared to run like a family business that crossed lines laid out in election law.
Dozens of interviews and an examination of thousands of pages of documents portray Mr. Dowless, a former car salesman, as a local political opportunist who was quick to seek ballots, collect them or offer rides to the polls. He employed a network of part-time helpers, some of them his own relatives, who, lured by promises of swift cash payments, would fan out across southeastern North Carolina in get-out-the-vote efforts for whichever candidate happened to be footing that year’s bill.
But that network operated with little oversight and accountability, critics say, and now Mr. Dowless has drawn national scrutiny amid a sprawling electoral fraud investigation that could result in a rare redo in a race for Congress.
Investigators are examining accounts of Mr. Dowless and people connected to his operation collecting absentee ballots directly from residents. Word of this apparent practice has stirred fears that those ballots were reported — or not reported — in ways that helped the Republican nominee, Mark Harris, to prevail by just 905 votes last month.
The state’s election board has declined to certify Mr. Harris as the winner in the Ninth Congressional District, and is expected to hold an evidentiary hearing this month. On Friday, the state identified Mr. Dowless as a “person of interest” in its investigation.
The scandal has been a setback for Mr. Harris, a pastor-turned-aspiring lawmaker whose campaign strategists hired Mr. Dowless for a get-out-the vote drive. And it has been an embarrassment for leaders of the Republican Party, who have spent years fretting that electoral fraud could come from undocumented immigrants. Now they are grappling with the possibility that it may have come from one of their own.
But over the years, Democrats and Republicans alike in North Carolina courted Mr. Dowless, who, over almost 15 years, went from being a registered Democrat to unaffiliated to Democrat to unaffiliated to Republican. They fraternized with him, and hired him to work his magic in service of boosting their vote tallies. They did so even though local news reports going back to at least 2010 noted his criminal record, which included felony convictions for perjury and fraud.
And they did so despite longstanding rumors that his get-out-the-vote tactics were unsavory at the least, and perhaps illegal.
“I only knew of him that he was crooked, as far as elections are concerned, and he had a way of doing it, and avoided prosecution and that kind of thing,” said Ben Snyder, the chairman of the Bladen County Democratic Party, who said he did not meet Mr. Dowless in person until 2016.
Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, said he had heard “a lot of chatter” about voter turnout operations over the years in Bladen County but paid it little mind because prosecutors never brought cases.
“Nothing sort of ever happened,” he said, “so I think you assume that there’s a whole lot of noise.”
In Bladen County this year, Mr. Harris won 61 percent of the accepted absentee ballots, even though registered Republicans accounted for only 19 percent of the ballots submitted.
Both the state elections board and the United States House of Representatives, which Democrats will control beginning in January, could force a new election in North Carolina.
