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ELIZABETHTOWN, NC – In the back shop of the only liquor store within 30 km of this low-lying city of eastern North Carolina, behind a window where it can to see better than his customers, Mark Gillespie paid his bills. . "They never stop," said the ABC shop manager.
But he sometimes looks up and sees who's coming: friends and family, the Dixie Youth Baseball League program coaches he's leading, parents of the scout troop he oversees.
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That is the reason, he says, he must pay attention to what he tells me when I ask the question about the new status of his county as epicenter of electoral fraud in the United States.
"I'm really mad at all this," the former county commissioner told me. "It's really embarrassing for my riding, my little little riding, to be on national news.
In the two weeks following Thanksgiving, Bladen County was investigated for irregularities in the race at the Ninth Congressional District of North Carolina. In particular, how did the Republican Mark Harris get 61% of the votes by correspondence while the Republican voters had asked for only 19% of the votes cast? How did he manage to win the county, given that he has three times more registered Democrats than Republicans?
The numbers are close enough to jeopardize Harris's apparent victory over Dan McCready at 905 votes and could even force a resumption of the vote. The fact that a small-scale fraud in a rural county of only 35,000 inhabitants could have falsified the outcome of one of the country's most-watched congressional races again recalls the outside influence economically left regions such as Bladen County, where the poverty rate is 20% and the median household income of $ 32,396 is about half of the national median.
The local and national media did a pretty good job in blaming the fraud on a man named Leslie McCrae Dowless. Dowless, who has always lived in the county, took money from an organization that took it out of the Harris campaign and handed it over to anyone wishing to go door-to-door and persuade people to ask and then submit the ballots by correspondence. Some of the infantrymen confirmed their pieces, and several voters signed affidavits stating that someone had taken their ballot paper unsealed and incomplete which is illegal.
But for two days and a dozen interviews, everyone I spoke to in Bladen County said that it would be unpredictable to blame Dowless.
"They choose these people who self-destruct, then they are guinea pigs who do everything they can do. a dollar, "says Sarah Jane Benson, whose family owns a restaurant in Bladenboro. "If it was not McCrae, it was someone else. They would have found someone else to do it.
Commentators from outside have had fun with clips showing people standing in front of moving houses and speaking with a pronounced southern accent, but the sad truth is that no matter how high the fraud goes on the floor is a portrait of poverty in America – people who need $ 100 for reasons ranging from Christmas gifts to opioid addiction going to poor and elderly neighbors who trust their ballots are between the hands of strangers. 19659002] I did not come for election fraud; it's more or less a fact accepted now. I have come to understand what makes a country like this one susceptible.
Some answers are clear. Bladen County is a petri dish that causes problems in rural America: it has lost about 5% of its population in the last seven years, more than any other county in the region. It is an agricultural community where the largest employer, Smithfield Foods, operates the largest pork processing plant in the world, with 4,400 employees working in a plant that slaughters about 35,000 hogs a day. The company contracts with neighboring farms to raise animals. Environmentalists and 26 prosecutions are currently engaging federal courts to deal with garbage and odors. Over the past three fall, Bladen has been inundated by two of the worst hurricanes in history, Matthew in 2016 and Florence in 2018, leaving city centers flooded and farmers without crops. And it's a place where the rate of unintended deaths due to the drug is about 29% higher than anywhere else in North Carolina.
This is a county that a hundred years ago was the center of a booming economy in agriculture, but has now grown. used to being forgotten. It is a place where people do not believe that big institutions – federal or even state-level government agencies – have their backs. It's a place where local races mean everything. Indeed, lingering feuds around some hotly contested elections, combined with a few hundred unsuspecting voters, can prove to be the heels of an election that saw 282,717 votes cast. votes.
Local Republicans believe that for years, Democrats have been collecting mail ballots from constituents to influence elections in the other way. And although the state election committee has not yet released the results of a 2016 survey on the activities of a local democrat CAP, it is clear that citizens of the two parties lost confidence in the electoral system well before this year.
Take Gillespie, for example. . It's a black democrat who voted for Dan McCready. He is a father of two and an optimist who devotes all his free time to volunteering. He says of the increasing probability of a new election: "I do not know what he will solve."
When I told him that it could change seats in Congress, he said, "It's crazy . That should not have happened to that. Yes, it scares me.
***
Before Dowless became a star the most famous figure in Bladen County was probably Guy Owen. The deceased novelist grew up on a tobacco farm near Clarkton in the 1920s. His best-known work is the 1965 light book The Flim-Flam Man's Ballad which became a film from George C. Scott. This is the story of a scammer named Mordecai Jones who travels to eastern North Carolina to make money against unsuspecting people.
At the beginning of the film version, the fraudster speaks to his accomplice about a plan to jostle people in a local card game.
"It's your line, is not it?", Asks the accomplice.
line, my boy. Greed. "
When I told the people of Bladen County that McCrae Dowless had become a Mordecai Jones-type figure, they laughed.
" I know Dowless. I do not talk to him, "said Charles DeVane, a 76-year-old general contractor and long-time Republican. "I do not shake his hand. He stuck me. "
I stuck you up? I asked.
" I was in the jewelery business, "he said." And he's m & # 39; Stuck twice in the 60's. He bought something and did not pay it. He did it once under McCrae Dowless, then once under Leslie Dowless. (The second one I said, "Do you know McCrae Dowless?" and he said, "Yes, he is my brother."
But even a flim-flam man needs an accomplice. [19659002] In interviews with local television stations, several people admitted to having gone door to door to collect ballots by mail and bring them to Dowless, and most of them reject the blame. do not know what happened after I dropped them, "said a woman, who was paid by Dowless, to a WSOC-TV reporter," I left them and what they do is on them. "[19659002] The apparent beneficiary of this scheme, Mark Harris – the candidate who hired the company that hired the company that hired Dowless – also said Friday that he was ignorant. In a video statement, he stated that he "absolutely ignored any wrongdoing".
But just about everyone in Bladen who pays attention to politics knows that there has already been act and the moment that many people point out is the local election of 2010. [19659002ThatyearagroupcalledtheBladenImprovementAssociationPACcreatedin1989 to promote black candidates to local posts, spends $ 15,500 to vote. The payments were modest: 62 dollars here and 262 dollars there, and spread over more than 60 people. They worked too. While the state feared much for the Conservatives this November, in Bladen County, Democrats swept all offices of the US Senate to record the acts.
To hear Republicans like Charles DeVane say, it all boiled down to the vote by correspondence. "They would go to old people's homes. They would cause unconscious people to obtain a ballot by correspondence. They would go to the cemetery, "said DeVane. "The Bladen Improvement Association does not represent the majority of Blacks in Bladen County. The majority of Blacks in Bladen County would have nothing to do with anything if it was illegal. But they take the poor and the ignorant and direct them.
It is not surprising that the members of the CCU, who represent an electoral bloc that has hardly benefited from representation over the years, see their work very differently. "We are the minority population; we are the minorities on the board, "says J. Michael Cogdell, county commissioner and active member of the Bladen Improvement PAC. "We simply hope and try to maintain a level playing field in civil rights. Make sure everyone is represented.
Nevertheless, after that, the Republicans began to organize their own voting efforts. "It's the only way to elect anyone," DeVane said. "You had to fight fire with fire."
This also seems to be Dowless's motivation. After serving a six – month prison sentence for insurance fraud in 1995, he 's carved a reputation as a passionate political observer who would be happy to work and work for him. one or the other of the parties, as long as it pays. In the 2010 elections, he worked for the candidate for Democratic District Attorney Harold "Butch" Pope. But one group irritated him more than others. After the 2016 election, he filed a complaint with the state election board, alleging that the Bladen Improvement PAC had illegally obtained mail ballots. But at the hearing of his complaint, in a strange scene documented in an episode of "This American Life," Dowless actually revealed details of his own plan to garner votes, and the council opened an investigation against him. For two years the council took no action.
Pat Melvin does not believe that Dowless has done anything illegal this time around. The Melvin family founded the city's most famous restaurant, Melvin's Burgers, in 1938. Pat sold it in the early 2000s. I met him in his small office located a quarter mile away, where he runs his real estate business. Melvin thinks that the state's electoral council must "get out of the way" and investigate all the years of election fraud in Bladen County. He does not doubt that they will find reprehensible acts among Democrats too. And the contest he says proves it's the 2010 County Sheriff's Contest.
The sheriff's run of that year burned the Conservatives the most. Democrat Prentis Benston took a close win in the second round, then beat unaffiliated candidate Billy Ward by 554 out of the 12,242 votes in the general election. Benston became the first black sheriff in the county.
Upon my arrival, Melvin printed the results of this race and sat them on his desk.
"Prentis had about 600 mail-in ballots," Melvin said. The implication was clear: a member of the Democratic Party had manipulated the number of absentees to elect Benston.
"But we have what we have about postal votes," he said.
At that moment, his phone came on and the insignificant notes of a bell rang in the small office.
"It's McCrae right there," Melvin tells me smiling at me.
"Hey, McCrae," he said on the phone.
Dowless, a man now known around the world, "Republican agent", who had been hiding at home, avoiding reporters all over the country – clearly telephoned.
"What's going on, buuud? ," he said.
"Well, actually, I'm in a conversation with a Politico man, the name is Michael."
A few seconds passed before Dowless spoke again, this time sweeter and more difficult to hear from where I was standing.He was talking to Melvin about a journalist who was trying to interview him.But he did not speak.
***
] Before 7 am Friday it was cold as I headed for a blazing pink sky gracing the top of vast fields and heading east to the Baptist Church. Tar Heel Men's Prayer Breakfast The only thing that does not materialize at daybreak in the farm fields is the inflatable Christmas decorations, wrinkled in the front yards.
Charles Ray Peterson, President of the county republican commission, invited me to join him for breakfast but around from the lobby of the low ceiling camaraderie, there were about 35 men of different races and political convictions. The hardest choice was in Hardee's bags. "Ham cookies on the right," a man said to me, "sausages left."
The main part of the breakfast was a local pastor who told the group that their mission in December was to "walk around Bladen County and people God loves them. They distributed a plate of offerings where all the money was destined for a drug and alcohol treatment center.
Then, several people approached me with a mission in mind: they wanted to tell me what was good in Bladen County.
Dennis Troy, retired postmaster and board chair of Bladen County Community College, announced Wednesday that the college has hired a new president to choose from nearly 70 candidates. "We had a list of 68 candidates who wanted to come to Bladen County!" Says Troy.
"An evil man does not make a county," McCrae Dowless chicken and beef farmer Colon Roberts said unknowingly. "It's all good people. You saw what these men did this morning. They took money from their pockets and gave it to people addicted to drugs. "
I turned around and asked the group organizer how much there was in the offering plate.
"One hundred and fifty-six dollars," he said.
***
Just before returning to Charlotte before a winter storm, I stopped at Melvin's for lunch.
On the parking lot, I met an old black man who was getting into his car after a stop at the hardware store. "I had spray," he said. "Cockroaches are trying to get home." William Tatum is an 82-year-old man who has retired from the forest industry with a dirty leg and bright, confident blue eyes. He lives in White Oak, a few miles from Elizabethtown.
I asked him what he thought of all the discussions about fraud. He told me that someone also came to his house.
"Three heads," he says.
I asked him what they had said.
"They asked me: did I want to vote early?", He said. "And I did not know. Yeah. "
He said all three were black women. He said that they came back weeks later. He does not remember their names. But he remembers telling them that he wanted to vote for all Democrats.
"They filled it for you?" I asked him.
"Yes, they filled it," he said.
He says he saw one of the women on the news.
"I really do not know what happened … I do not know if they tried to bring in elderly people who did not know anything or what. You know how it can be, he says. "I know it's not good. If it does not work, it can not be true.
I said goodbye and headed for my last stop, the Elections Office, a few blocks away. I wanted to verify in fact Pat Melvin's claim that there were enough postal ballots in 2010 to transform the elections that helped reverse the election process in Bladen County. Valeria Peacock, Acting Director, greeted me. I asked how she was doing.
"It's not the day to ask that," she says. (Later on Friday evening, a WBTV reporter learned that the vice president of the board of directors resigned that day, about the time of my visit.) "This It's not the week to ask that. "
I told her I was only looking for the number of votes for the sheriff's run of 2010. She cast me a puzzled look. it was not the election that people scream after all. Moments later, she handed me the results, all on one page. I went through the pen to see if Prentis Benston had actually won more than 600 absentee votes that year, as Pat Melvin had said. It's a big case, but I told myself that a different result in this sheriff's race would have changed not only the course of politics in this little county, but perhaps even the US Congress.
The number of absentees, however, Benston's margin of victory was 554. Even without the absentees, he would have won.
Later, I called Melvin to tell him what I had found. He was kind.
"I'm glad you corrected me," he says. "Again, though, how did Prentis get more votes than Billy? They worked harder. This is what still works today: the one who works the hardest gets the votes. "
.
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