N.C. voting fraud scheme detailed
GOP operative is accused of falsifying absentee ballots.
RALEIGH, N.C. — State election officials said a political operative for Republican Mark Harris orchestrated a complex scheme to illegally collect and falsify absentee ballots last year, hiding evidence of the plot as it unfolded and obstructing the state’s investigation after the election.
Those explosive charges opened a hearing Monday in which the North Carolina State Board of Elections began hearing testimony to decide whether enough ballots were tampered with to taint the outcome of the 9th Congressional District race.
The board has the power to call for a new election or to certify the November results. According to unofficial results in the nation’s last undecided congressional race, Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes.
The state board’s executive director, Kim Strach, told the five-member panel that Leslie McCrae Dowless, a longtime political operative, 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 submitted as many as 1,249 ballots overall in the general election.
And they took great lengths to avoid “raising red flags” with election officials, said Strach’s first witness, Lisa Britt, who worked for Dowless.
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’ office, Britt said. 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 wouldn’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 whether 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 absentee-ballot program and other get-outthe-vote operations, had collected ballots illegally.
The allegations have prompted Democrats to demand a new election, whereas 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.
The investigation has refocused the national debate about election fraud. Republicans, led by President Trump, have alleged widespread voter fraud and advocated for strict ID laws and criminal prosecutions.
Democrats have argued that the kind of in-person fraud Republicans have targeted is rare, accusing their opponents of trying to hinder ballot access and intimidate voters who typically vote Democratic.
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 action if its members vote along partisan lines. That would turn attention to Congress, which also has the power to order a new election.
Two big questions remained unanswered. Did Harris, 52, an evangelical pastor from suburban Charlotte, know about the 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. He 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.
About 150 people filled the hearing room, many of them lawyers for the campaigns and their associates.
Strach told the board that her staff deployed four investigators in the 9th District, interviewing 142 voters and 30 witnesses and examining thousands of 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 that 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, Todd Johnson.
Former Rep. Robert Pittenger, whom Harris defeated in the Republican primary last June, said in December that Dowless approached him in 2016 but he declined to hire him. “I just knew I didn’t want to be involved with him,” Pittenger said. “Dowless’ efforts were widely known, and we did share our concerns with several people.”
Since opening the most recent inquiry late last year, investigators have published reams of evidence and affidavits on the state board’s website, including examples of absentee ballots allegedly collected and turned in by Dowless or his crew.
Perhaps the star witness could be Dowless himself, though it’s unknown whether he will agree to testify or decline to do so to avoid self-incrimination, as he did at a hearing over similar irregularities more than two years ago.