The North Carolina state Board of Elections announced Friday that their next hearing on the apparent election fraud in the 9th District would not be held until Jan. 11, a change from their previous self-imposed deadline of Dec. 21. The new Congress convenes on Jan. 3, and with this delay, we know the state won’t have results certified before that date, so it’s extremely unlikely that the new Democratic majority would seat anyone at that point. Both parties now expect that there will be a new election in the 9th District, which would mean the seat will just remain vacant until such an election can take place.
And it’s growing even less likely that Republican Mark Harris will be the district’s next representative. Late on Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Harris had personally sought out McCrae Dowless, the operative at the center of the alleged absentee ballot fraud scheme that’s the target of investigators. Even worse, the paper writes that Harris wanted to hire Dowless precisely because he was responsible for producing some almost impossible absentee results for a candidate who ran against Harris in the 2016 primary.
Two years ago, Harris and Union County Commissioner Todd Johnson both narrowly lost the nomination to Rep. Robert Pittenger; during that campaign, Dowless was working for Johnson (who was just elected to the state Senate). Harris was warned by his advisors on election night that he was likely the victim of fraud after he and Pittenger received a total of five votes among mail-in ballots from Bladen County—the same county under intense scrutiny now—while Johnson won an astounding 221 of them. Harris ended up just 134 votes behind Pittenger districtwide while Johnson finished third overall.
A year later, when Harris was planning to seek a rematch with Pittenger, multiple sources say he made sure to get Dowless on his team despite warnings about the operative’s criminal record and even Dowless’ “own public testimony describing questionable election tactics,” which he divulged to the state Board of Elections in an earlier investigation in 2016.
In May of this year, with Dowless now on his team, Harris defeated Pittenger in a tight primary. This time, Harris won 437 of Bladen County’s 456 mail-in ballots. Pittenger’s staff complained to national Republicans that he was the victim of fraud, but the state GOP and NRCC reportedly sat on these allegations, and the congressman eventually conceded defeat to Harris weeks later. And now, Bladen County’s mail-in ballots are once again the focus of election fraud allegations, this time for the general election.