Officials: Operative in N.C. falsified ballots
In testimony, they say he tried to block fraud investigation
RALEIGH, N.C. — State election officials said that a political operative for Republican Mark Harris orchestrated a complex scheme to illegally collect and falsify absentee ballots last year, hiding evidence of the scheme as it unfolded and obstructing the state’s investigation after the election.
Those explosive charges opened an evidentiary hearing Monday in Raleigh, where the North Carolina State Board of Elections began hearing witness testimony to decide whether enough ballots were tampered with to taint the outcome of the the 9th Congressional District race.
The board has the power to call for a new election or certify the November results. According to unofficial results in the nation’s last undecided congressional race, Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by just 905 votes.
The state board’s executive director, Kim Strach, told the fivemember board Monday that Leslie McCrae Dowless, a longtime political operative from Bladen County, paid workers to collect hundreds of absentee ballots from voters, a felony in North Carolina. Dowless and his employees in some cases forged voter signatures and witness signatures and filled out blank or incomplete ballots, Strach said. They operated in both Bladen and Robeson counties, submitting as many as 1,249 ballots overall in the general election.
And they took great lengths to avoid “raising red flags” with election officials, Strach’s first witness, Lisa Britt, said. They mailed no more than nine or 10 ballots at a time, and they made sure to mail them from the post offices nearest the voters’ homes, even though many of the ballots were signed and witnessed en masse at Dowless’s office. They took pains to use the same ink for voter and witness signatures, and to ensure stamps were affixed to the ballot envelopes in a way that didn’t reveal a pattern, Britt said.
“I had placed a stamp upside down” on one of the ballot envelopes, Britt testified. “Mr. Dowless fussed at me about that. I guess one or two woudn’t have mattered, but if you’ve got 10 or 15 coming in that way, they’re going to say, ‘Now hey, wait a minute.’ ”
Strach did not say that Harris knew of the scheme.
The election has been in limbo since November when evidence first surfaced that Dowless, whom Harris hired to lead his absenteeballot program and other get-outthe-vote operations, had collected ballots illegally in Bladen County.
The allegations have prompted Democrats to demand a new election while Republicans have called repeatedly for Harris to be sworn in, citing the absence of public evidence that fraud affected the outcome or that Harris knew of the scheme.
Adding to the uncertainty, the state elections board requires a supermajority of four votes to call for a new election. With three Democrats and two Republicans, the board will not have the votes to take any action at all if its members vote along partisan lines. That would turn attention to Congress, which also has the power to order a new election.
One seat in the hearing room Monday was labeled “U.S. House counsel.”
Two big questions remained unanswered after the first few hours of testimony: Did Harris, 52, an evangelical pastor from suburban Charlotte, know about the alleged scheme? And were enough ballots affected by fraud to change the outcome of the election?
Harris personally directed Dowless’ hiring despite being warned about his tactics but has said repeatedly that he had no knowledge of Dowless’ allegedly illegal operations.
Britt, the first witness, declared on the stand that Harris knew nothing.
“I think you’ve got one innocent person in this thing who hasn’t done anything wrong and who is getting a really bad rap in all of this, and that’s Mr. Harris,” she said.
With that declaration, the board announced a lunch break. The campaigns’ lawyers will get a chance to question Britt after the break.
Dowless’ lawyer, Cynthia Singletary, told reporters that Britt’s testimony “is not true.” Asked if Dowless directed illegal ballot-harvesting, she responded, “Hell no!”
Strach told the board that the staff deployed four investigators in the 9th District, interviewing 142 voters and 30 witnesses and examining thousands of subpoenaed campaign and phone records.
She said Dowless paid his workers $125 for every 50 absentee ballots they collected. And she said he tried to obstruct the investigation after the fact. She showed a TV interview with Britt in which she sat in Dowless’ kitchen and said no one had broken any laws. Britt said Dowless, who was present for that interview, had instructed she sit for it. He also instructed her to testify Monday that he had done nothing wrong, she said.
Dowless, 63, was investigated in 2016, when he helped deliver an overwhelming share of the mail-in vote in Bladen County for a different Republican congressional candidate.
McCready, 35, argued in his brief that if the state board fails to call for a new election, the U.S. House should then do so. But not all Democrats on the Hill relish that opportunity.
“House leaders are cognizant of how far they should push to set new precedent here,” said a senior Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill who was not authorized to speak publicly. “But they also recognize that this is a potentially unprecedented situation, if the state board can neither certify the election nor order a new one.”