Election fraud scandal in North Carolina: Mark Harris to testify before the board of directors

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At a hearing in North Carolina, investigators detailed an "illegal", "coordinated" and well-funded conspiracy to alter absentee voting during an election in the US House of Commons. United States that remains without appeal more than three months after polling day – to clarify the situation to one of the strangest election scandals of recent memory.

State investigators on Monday established their theory of the case – that a local agent hired by Republican, Leslie McCrae Dowless, had ordered a coordinated ploy to illegally collect, falsely testify, and tamper with. in any other way the ballot papers of the absentees – and the workers who had helped the scheme delivered an overwhelming testimony over several hours.

Monday's session ended with Dowless, under the advice of his lawyer, who refused to testify before the election committee. They met again the next two days to continue the hearing and the proceedings continued until Thursday, Republican candidate Mark Harris to stand at the helm.

But at the start of Thursday's hearing, the jury revealed that the Harris campaign had brought new evidence the day before his testimony: contacts that had not been previously disclosed between the candidate and Dowless. Harris' lawyers said they misunderstood the extent of the demand for the investigation. Democratic lawyer Marc Elias called the documents "explosive importance". He asked the court to consider how the evidence was made public as "harmful interferences" by the Harris team.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, a prominent political consultant for the Harris campaign and the candidate's own son testified remarkably about the decision to hire Dowless. Consultants Andy Yates and John Harris both insisted that Mr. Harris did not know what Dowless was doing and was too confident about the operator's claims. Still, John Harris said he warned his father that Dowless's previous work on mail ballots appeared to be illegal, a warning ignored by the candidate. As his son closed his testimony with some kind remarks about his parents, Mark Harris was in tears.

The election committee – made up of three Democrats and two Republicans – finally resumed after Governor Roy Cooper appointed new members to an unrelated legal dispute. They are currently reviewing the evidence and then deciding what to do at the end of the hearing. Harris's campaign urged the Electoral Committee to certify his victory; Democrat Dan McCready's campaign calls on the council to call for a new election.

"They have two options at the end of the hearing. One is to certify the victory of Mark Harris. Secondly, call for a new election, "explains Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics at Catawba College, who follows the controversy.

A previous round of the North Carolina Election Committee refused to certify Harris's apparent victory over McCready because of evidence that mail ballots had been falsified. More than a month after the beginning of the new Congress, there is still no US representative in the ninth congressional district of North Carolina.

Under state law, the council can call new elections if the basic fairness of these elections is tainted. It did not matter that the number of votes in dispute was sufficient to tip the result. Electoral Council chairman Bob Cordle, a Democrat, noted in a recent interview that in previous races in which a new election had been called, the margin made no difference.

"They did not have to decide that the result would have been reversed," Cordle told WFAE, Inside Politics. "We obviously want to have a fair election."

What we learned about the alleged manipulation of the ballot at the public hearing

In North Carolina, it is important to remember two things about postal ballots: anyone can ask for one and at the end of every day before the election, state officials publish a file in which the voters asked for a postal ballot by mail and they returned it. To be counted.

A campaign could check this file every morning to find out how many Republican, Democrat and Non-Registered voters had requested and returned a postal ballot.

"From a mechanical point of view, it is a goldmine of information for candidates and their campaign," said Bitzer previously.

This wealth of data would have provided Dowless and his associates with a detailed idea of the number of postal ballots sent daily by Republican, Democratic and unaffiliated voters – and, by extension, the number of ballot papers by which they need. voters to keep pace with Democrats.

Indeed, some of the workers who testified before the commission on Monday said that Dowless was discussing with other agents how the state of the postal vote was taken into account. Harris would have even questioned Dowless at some point about his apparent confidence in the state of election advancement.

Investigators working on behalf of the North Carolina Election Committee began Monday's hearing outlining the alleged misrepresentation system, led by Dowless, and interviewed Lisa Britt and several other women who worked for him. .

Britt, who was Dowless's daughter-in-law for a while, said she was close to him and thought she had done something wrong. But she insisted more than once on the fact that the GOP candidate, Harris, had not been aware of the conspiracy.

Between the opening statement of the investigators, the testimony of Britt and the corroborating evidence of other witnesses, here is what we learned about the so-called vote alteration ploy:

State investigators said that Dowless had used postal voting request forms in previous elections to "pre-fill" the forms for the 2018 election and sent the workers look for voters so that they can sign the forms and request a vote. . "
The workers reportedly submitted the forms to Dowless and received a payment from Dowless based on the number of people they allegedly brought. They then sent the forms to the election office.
At least 780 application forms for absentee would have been submitted by Dowless or one of its workers.
Investigators said that as part of the "Phase Two" of the operation, Dowless had sent workers to search the voters' ballots by mail correspondence.
Some of the ballots collected by the workers had not been signed by witnesses or had not been sealed. They returned these newsletters to Dowless again and received a return payment.
According to the investigators, Dowless held the returned ballots and ordered the workers to falsely sign as witnesses some of the ballots he had collected.
In order not to arouse the suspicion of state officials, the ballots were mailed in small batches to post offices near the voters' homes, and the workers ensured that the dates of their signatures and even ink used correspond to those of the electors.
In her testimony, Britt confirmed much of the investigators' thesis, claiming that she had collected ballots, that Dowless had ordered people to sign ballots for which they had not been able to vote. not present, and that she had signed her mother's name on some ballots so as not to arouse the suspicions of the state board.
Britt testified that if the ballots were not sealed and elections were left blank, she would fill some of the empty desks – again, this had been done to avoid arousing the suspicions of the responsible for state elections. (She said she never put Harris's name on a ballot because voters usually filled at least the congressional race and a few others.)
Britt also testified that Dowless contacted her shortly before Monday's hearing and provided her with a statement so that she could plead the Fifth in her testimony.

Collecting a ballot by mail on behalf of another person and being a mock witness of a ballot – two of the allegations made in the testimony of witnesses – is a violation of state law, according to investigators of the state. 'State.

Britt, Andy Yates and John Harris insisted that Harris was not aware of the plan. Democratic investigators and lawyers have again criticized Yates for failing to identify Dowless's criminal background while working for Yates in the Harris campaign. John Harris also told the board that he had warned his father that Dowless might have run an illegal election campaign in previous elections – but his father hired him when even.

State investigators also stated that they had not been able to determine whether the advance polling numbers had been inappropriately shared with third parties, one of the other allegations that have made in the affidavits that triggered the fraud scandal.

The number of absentee ballots not returned to the ninth was unusually high

The focus is mainly focused on two ninth counties: Bladen and Robeson, in the southeast corner of the state near the border of South Carolina. Notably, each of the affidavits provided by Democratic lawyers involved voters from Bladen County, and one man said that Dowless himself had stated that he was working on mail ballots for Harris in the county.

Bitzer documented the unusual trend in these counties: they had a much higher rate of mailed ballots that were requested but not returned, compared to other counties in the ninth district.

And at the district level, according to Bitzer's calculations, the ninth had a rate of mail ballots not referred much higher than any other district in North Carolina.

Bitzer also found that the number of votes received by Harris from postal ballots sent to Bladen was remarkably high. It is the only county where the Republican won the postal correspondence vote, winning 61% of the vote against 38% for McCready.

Strangely, however, on the basis of the partisan distribution of accepted postal ballots in the county, Harris should have won not only all Republican ballots, but also almost all non-registered ballot papers. from one or the other party and a substantial number of Democrat ballots. well.

In other words, according to the data, Harris seems to have benefited from a strangely high voice share in these two counties, where one of his agents was working. Substantial evidence of alteration of the vote was presented at a public hearing that could, at the end of it, give rise to further ninth-ranked elections in North Carolina.

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