Absentee ballots will be honored at the North Carolina House Race Hearing

February 17, 2019, 23:57 GMT

By Leigh Ann Caldwell, Jeremia Kimelman and Rich Gardella

RALEIGH, North Carolina – The North Carolina Electoral Council is set to begin Monday its long-awaited hearing on allegations of election irregularities over mail-order ballots in the not yet certified election between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready in the ninth district of the state.

Elections have been dragged into turmoil since the end of the race last November, leaving the district unrepresented since the new congressional assembly on Jan. 3.

As of Monday, the Board will hear arguments relating to allegations of vote fraud related to Harris's prominent postal voting advantage, particularly in Bladen County, a rural area between Fayetteville and Wilmington, in the southeast of the state.

The publicly published affidavits included allegations by voters in North Carolina that their mail ballots had been illegally collected and, in some cases, altered or discarded. The state council has investigated the extent of these incidents.

A new analysis of NBC News raw data on statewide elections revealed that 3,510 postal ballots requested throughout the district had never been returned and that no vote was taken. 39 was counted for these persons by no other method. For Bladen County alone, this number was 472.

The results of the absentee vote in Bladen County were one of the cornerstones of the Board's extensive review. Harris has an unofficial lead on McCready with only 905 votes.

His campaign garnered a margin of victory of 1,557 votes in Bladen County. Sixty-one percent of the mail ballots were cast for him, although only 19% of these were by registered Republicans.

Central to the controversy are allegations of unlawful collection and manipulation of postal ballots by political agent McCrae Dowless and others working for him. Dowless was hired by political consulting firm Red Dome Group as an "independent contractor" to assist the Harris campaign in Bladen County.

The commission is expected to hear dozens of witnesses convened by the state, as well as by the Harris and McCready campaigns. These include Dowless, Andy Yates, leader of the Red Dome Group, Harris and voters whose ballots may have been falsified or illegally collected.

At the end of the hearing, which could last more than one day, the election office will decide whether to certify the race in favor of Harris, the Republican, or to hold new elections.

Harris and the Republican Party of North Carolina have maintained their distance from Dowless and ask the council to approve the election.

McCready calls for a new election, arguing that the evidence already made public shows that Dowless's efforts to "win the vote" have "corrupted" a greater number of ballots than the apparent margin of victory.

Mark Elias, a long-time Democratic Party and Clinton lawyer, represented the party's importance for the election.

Under state law, the board of directors has the power to order new elections in a given contest if it determines that there were enough votes. 39 Irregularities or irregularities sufficiently widespread to "alter the results of the general elections and to cast doubt on their fairness"

The state council has investigated Dowless and allegations about its mail-order voting operation since at least 2016. Candidates who had previously hired Dowless – Republican and Democrat – have won similar, seemingly disproportionate, victories in the mail ballot County Bladen.

In a letter to the North Carolina State Elections Council, the Democrat-led US House of Representatives said it could conduct its own investigation if Harris's election was certified at the end of the hearing. . The House has the last word on the opportunity to sit on its members.