The 9th District of North Carolina Depends on the Election Hearing on Monday: NPR

Three months after the mid-term elections, voters in North Carolina's 9th congressional district could finally find out who their MP will be, or whether they will have to go to the polls again.

The North Carolina State Elections Council will meet on Monday for a hearing that could last several days and review the evidence gathered by investigators for months.

In the unofficial count of the 9th district race, Republican Mark Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready with 905 votes. But the election was tainted with allegations that an agent hired by Harris had collected and potentially manipulated mail ballots.

Investigators from the state electoral council have been investigating the charges since early December.

The person of interest was known before

Shortly after the 2018 elections, the state electoral committee voted in a bipartisan manner to delay the accreditation of the race and to begin an investigation. McCrae Dowless was named a person of interest by the board of directors shortly thereafter.

Dowless has repeatedly declined to comment on NPR and has not spoken publicly since the start of the investigation. Her lawyer, Cynthia Adams Singletary, issued a statement in December claiming that Dowless had not broken any laws and that an investigation would prove it.

A number of voters came forward to say that Dowless or people paid by Dowless had taken their ballot by mail, which is illegal in North Carolina.

Election results in Bladen County, where Dowless is headquartered, also indicated that something was wrong.

Harris won 61% of the ballots by mail to Bladen, while only 19% of the voters who voted by mail were registered in the Republican Register. For Harris to get that 61%, he should have won every Republican and unaffiliated voter as well as some registered Democrats, which would raise questions about whether the ballots were being manipulated or thrown away.

Harris said he had frequent contact with Dowless throughout his campaign, even stating that he had a "pastoral" relationship with him, but that he did not know that he was not going to talk to him. there was no illegal activity. Harris told The Associated Press last week that he was unaware of Dowless's criminal record, which included convictions for fraud and perjury to insurance, and a history of Dowless's unsavory electoral tactics.

The state electoral council investigated potential election fraud in Bladen County in 2016, and Dowless testified at a public hearing, which was featured in an episode of the show. radio and podcast at the national level, The American Life.

The state council sent its findings of investigation to the US District Attorney's Office for North Carolina in 2017.

"Our findings so far suggest that individuals and potentially individuals involved in attempts to manipulate election results through the process of voting by correspondence," wrote the executive director of the elections council, Kim Strach. in January 2017 have occurred in the past and, if left unresolved, will likely continue for the next election. "

Potential next steps

The Electoral Election Committee, composed of three Democrats and two Republicans, should decide at the end of the hearing on how to proceed.

To certify Harris, it would take three votes, which means that at least one Democrat should vote for. And to hold a new election, it would take four votes, which means that at least one Republican should vote for.

If the board finds itself in a deadlock after the hearing, Harris would be accredited under the North Carolina law. But Democrats, who now hold a majority in the US House of Representatives, said they would not sit in Harris if there were questions about the fairness of the elections. In this case, the House could judge the vacancy, which would then give Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, the power to call a new election.

In the case of a new breed, voters in the 9th district are likely to spend much of the year 2019 without representation in Congress. According to experts, between the length of filing periods and the primary news, a new member of the House would likely not sit until the end of summer or fall.