A state hearing finally brings some clarity to the explosive election fraud scandal.
At a North Carolina hearing Monday, investigators started laying out in detail an “unlawful,” “coordinated,” and “well-funded” plot to tamper with absentee ballots in a US House election that remains uncalled more than three months after Election Day — finally bringing some clarity to one of the most bizarre election scandals in recent memory.
State investigators established their theory of the case — that a Republican operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, directed a coordinated scheme to unlawfully collect, falsely witness, and otherwise tamper with absentee ballots — and a worker who says she assisted him in the scheme delivered explosive testimony over several hours.
On Monday, the election board — made up of three Democrats and two Republicans — reconvened after Gov. Roy Cooper named new members amid an unrelated legal dispute. They have started reviewing the evidence in the case and then they are expected to decide what course to take at the end of the hearing, which could last more than one day. The Harris campaign is urging the elections board to certify his win; Democrat Dan McCready’s campaign is asking the board to call for a new election.
More than a month into the new Congress, there is still no United States representative from North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District. North Carolina’s election board refused to certify Republican Mark Harris’s apparent victory over McCready because of the evidence that absentee ballots were tampered with.
“They have two options at the end of the hearing. One is to certify Mark Harris’s win. Second is to call for a new election,” says Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College who has been following the controversy.
Under state law, the board can call a new election if the basic fairness of the election is tainted. It does not appear to matter whether the number of votes in dispute would have been enough to swing the outcome. Election board chair Bob Cordle, a Democrat, noted in a recent interview that in prior races in which a new election was called, the margin did not make a difference.
