L. McCrae Dowless ran an operation that, despite his checkered past, drew little scrutiny \u2014 until he ended up in the middle of an election marred by fraud charges<\/b>
\nBLADENBORO, N. C. \u2014 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 fianc\u00e9e 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 \u201cguru of elections\u201d 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\u2019s absentee ballot.
In this rural region near the state\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 or not reported \u2014 in ways that helped the Republican nominee, Mark Harris, to prevail by just 905 votes last month.
The state\u2019s 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 \u201cperson of interest\u201d 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.
\u201cI 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,\u201d 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 \u201ca lot of chatter\u201d about voter turnout operations over the years in Bladen County but paid it little mind because prosecutors never brought cases.
\u201cNothing sort of ever happened,\u201d he said, \u201cso I think you assume that there\u2019s a whole lot of noise.\u201d
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.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Dowless opened his door with a cigarette between his knuckles as a holiday light machine projected a whirling, speckled glow onto his modest house. In the side yard, a campaign sign for Mr. Harris rested in the grass.
Mr. Dowless said he could not talk, given the controversy. \u201cI don\u2019t mean to be rude,\u201d he said.
On Friday, he again declined to be interviewed but this time recited a phone number for a lawyer, who did not respond to a message.
Local residents said Mr. Dowless \u2014 who is also a soil and water conservation district supervisor \u2014 was busy but available. \u201cIf you need help he\u2019s going to help you out,\u201d said Barry Hester, 64, a retired construction worker who went to high school with Mr. Dowless. \u201cLike people who aren\u2019t so fortunate. If they need a ride, they\u2019ll call McCrae.\u2019\u2019
Politicians and voters said Mr. Dowless depended on cash and a short paper trail.
\u201cEverything was verbal,\u201d said Pete Givens, who briefly hired Mr. Dowless for a Charlotte City Council campaign last year.
The Dowless operation also relied on workers like Ginger Eason, who told WSOC, a Charlotte television station, that Mr. Dowless paid her $75 to $100 a week to go door to door this year to encourage people to vote for Mr. Harris and a candidate for sheriff. She also said she picked up completed absentee ballots and brought them to Mr. Dowless, but was not sure what he did with them.
\u201cI don\u2019t know nothing what happened after I dropped them off,\u201d she said.
Kirby Wright, 47, and his mother, Doris Lee Hammonds, 77, recall that a women they recognized as Ms. Eason came to their home one night to pick up their absentee ballots.
The pair had thick envelopes containing their absentee ballots but never filled them out. When Ms. Eason came by, she said she needed them.
\u201cI told her I was going to throw it away,\u201d Mr. Wright said in an interview. \u201cIt was blank. She said, \u2018No, I\u2019ve got to pick up all the empty ballots.\u2019\u201d Ms. Eason could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Wright said he isn\u2019t sure what happened to the ballot designated for his mother, who is bedridden. It might have been thrown in the trash, he said. But state records show Ms. Hammonds cast an absentee ballot by mail. Ms. Hammonds, also interviewed, said she never filled it out or signed the absentee ballot at all.
Ms. Eason told the Charlotte television station that she never discarded any ballots. But a large number of unreturned absentee ballots in Bladen County, as well as adjacent Robeson County, prompted concerns among elections officials, campaign strategists and independent researchers that Mr. Dowless\u2019s network may have engaged in wider fraud.
So do the accounts of some voters. At Village Oaks, an apartment complex in Bladenboro, several residents said they had seen a truck at the complex with a Harris campaign placard at the same time that groups of three or four women would appear to collect ballots or encourage people to request absentee ballots during election season.
\u201cThey were around, saying they would help people cast absentee ballots,\u201d said Barbie Silvas, who mailed in a ballot this year. \u201cThey said, \u2018I\u2019m here for McCrae to help people to vote.\u2019\u201d
Mr. Dowless appeared in the news in the early 1990s after he was accused of taking out, and collecting on, a life insurance policy on an employee who had just died, backdating it and forging a signature. He ultimately spent about six months in prison, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.
Less than two decades later, he was one of a handful of get-out-the-vote experts who wielded significant influence in Bladen County, a struggling rural area where one in four people live below the poverty line. Records show that beginning in 2009, at least seven Democratic and Republican candidates paid him for work.
In 2010, Mr. Dowless worked for a Democratic candidate for district attorney. A local television station at that time named Mr. Dowless as one of \u201ca few heavy hitters in the Bladen County get-out-the-vote arena.\u201d Part of the local political culture, the station reported, involved political operatives distributing sample ballots for which they had sold spots to the highest-bidding candidates.
The Republican candidate, Jonathan M. David, eventually won the election. He criticized the pay-to-play tactics, which he said \u201clets a small group of people who don\u2019t have the best interest of the community at heart, but their own financial interest at stake, to dictate who becomes important leaders in their community.\u201d
That same year produced a political landmark for Bladen County, which elected a Democrat as its first black sheriff.
The racial backlash \u2014 the county was then 56 percent white and 35 percent black \u2014 was palpable, recalled Patsy Sheppard, now a vice chairwoman of the local Democratic Party. She recalled hearing her fellow whites say, \u201cWe need a white sheriff.\u201d
When a white challenger, James A. McVicker, emerged in 2014, Mr. Dowless was able to earn several thousand dollars in cash helping to get him elected by running a 20-worker absentee ballot operation.
According to records in a lawsuit, Mr. Dowless was paid $5,800 in cash by Jeffrey Smith, the owner of a video gambling parlor, who was worried that the incumbent sheriff would raid the business.
Mr. McVicker, a Republican, won \u2014 and Mr. Smith\u2019s business was raided anyway. His company filed a lawsuit against the new sheriff and noted that Mr. McVicker had won the election by almost 350 votes. Mr. Smith\u2019s lawyers implied in a court filing that without \u201cMr. Dowless\u2019 efforts\u201d on absentee ballots, Mr. McVicker would not have won.
In 2014, state records show, Mr. Dowless opened a consulting business with Jens L. Lutz, a local Democratic activist. Mr. Lutz, one of two Democrats on Bladen County\u2019s four-member elections board, said Friday that he only went into business with Mr. Dowless as a kind of sleuthing operation to root out the unethical tactics he thought Mr. Dowless employed.
\u201cI knew there was some suspicion and I was doing it to solidify any suspicion of any wrongdoing,\u201d Mr. Lutz said, but added that he found it difficult to learn many of Mr. Dowless\u2019s methods. (After The New York Times questioned Mr. Lutz on Friday about his dealings with Mr. Dowless, Mr. Lutz resigned from the elections board.)
Meanwhile, word had spread to neighboring Robeson County that Mr. Dowless had a formula for delivering victories. Mickey Meekins heard the word, and decided to call Mr. Dowless when decided to run for county commissioner in 2014.
But after paying Mr. Dowless $20,000, Mr. Meekins rapidly became disenchanted.
\u201cThey actually didn\u2019t get no vote,\u201d said Mr. Meekins, who lost, adding that he assumed Mr. Dowless used sloppy or suspect tactics.
In January 2016, the consulting firm he founded with Mr. Lutz dissolved, but Mr. Dowless continued his own work. One client was Todd Johnson, a Republican who, along with Mr. Harris, wanted to unseat Robert M. Pittenger, the incumbent congressman in the Ninth District.
Mr. Johnson, who lives near Charlotte, a city almost three hours from Bladen County\u2019s seat, finished last in the primary race, but dominated in Bladen. Of 226 absentee-by-mail votes in the county, Mr. Johnson received 221.
Mr. Pittenger recalled that he, too, could have hired Mr. Dowless. The men met, the congressman said, but Mr. Pittenger \u201cquickly ended the meeting over personal concerns with his proposal.\u201d
\u201cWe didn\u2019t talk long enough for me to gather detailed information,\u201d Mr. Pittenger said. \u201cI just knew I didn\u2019t want to be involved with him.\u201d
In April, just ahead of this year\u2019s Republican primary, Herman Dunn, Bladen County\u2019s former chief deputy sheriff, saw Mr. Dowless at a polling place.
Mr. Dunn wrote in an affidavit that Mr. Dowless told him he was \u201cdoing absentee\u201d work for both Mr. McVicker, the sheriff, and Mr. Harris.
\u201cYou know I don\u2019t take checks,\u201d Mr. Dowless said, according to Mr. Dunn, who had worked for the sheriff Mr. McVicker defeated. \u201cThey have to pay me cash.\u201d
According to Mr. Dunn, Mr. Dowless also boasted that he had more than 80 people under his command in Mr. Harris\u2019s race. (That figure could not be independently corroborated. Red Dome Group, the consulting firm that contracted with Mr. Dowless on behalf of Mr. Harris\u2019s campaign, did not respond to requests for comment.)
As the state\u2019s investigation into potential fraud continues, people like Jeneva Legions wonder about their voting experiences. Ms. Legions, 30, who lives in the Village Oaks apartments, said she\u2019d had her absentee ballot for a day or two when several women came to her door. One of the women said, \u2018Are you Jeneva? I\u2019ve come to get your ballot,\u2019\u201d Ms. Legions said.
When Ms. Legions told them she had not voted yet, one of the women told her she should sign the ballot and fill in her Social Security number. The women left, Ms. Legions said. Not long afterward, one of the women returned.
\u201cI gave it to her,\u201d Ms. Legions said in a telephone interview. \u201cI thought she worked for the county. I thought she was one of the voting people coming to get my ballot.\u201d
Ms. Legions said she had not sealed the envelope when she gave it to the woman. Her ballot, records show, was never returned to elections officials.<\/p>\n