N.C.’s ‘guru of elections’ is under scrutiny
Absentee ballot furor may lead to new vote in U.S. House district
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.
Dowless soon had the sealed ballots in his hands and was off to the post office to mail them, Thompson said.
Thompson 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, 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, Dowless’ 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 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 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 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 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.
Upcoming hearing
The state’s election board has declined to certify Harris as the winner in the 9th Congressional District and is expected to hold an evidentiary hearing this month. On Friday, the state identified Dowless as a “person of interest” in its investigation.
The scandal has been a setback for Harris, a pastor-turned-aspiring lawmaker whose campaign strategists hired Dowless for a getout-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 immigrants living in the country without legal permission. 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 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-outthe-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, chairman of the Bladen County Democratic Party, who said he did not meet Dowless in person until 2016.
Dallas Woodhouse, 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.”
Some unusual figures
In Bladen County this year, 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 U.S. House of Representatives, which Democrats will control beginning in January, could force a new election in North Carolina.
On Wednesday night, 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 Harris rested in the grass.
Dowless said he could not talk, given the controversy. “I don’t mean to be rude,” 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.
As the state’s investigation into potential fraud continues, people like Jeneva Legions wonder about their voting experiences. Legions, 30, who lives in the Village Oaks apartments, said she’d had her absentee ballot for a day or two when several women came to her door. One of the women said, ‘Are you Jeneva? I’ve come to get your ballot,’ ” Legions said.
When 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, Legions said. Not long afterward, one of the women returned.
“I gave it to her,” Legions said in a telephone interview. “I thought she worked for the county. I thought she was one of the voting people coming to get my ballot.”
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.