Here’s a bombshell in the unfolding story of election fraud in North Carolina: The Washington Post reports that the National Republican Congressional Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party were told about suspected absentee ballot fraud after the May primary, in which Mark Harris defeated incumbent Rep. Robert Pittenger. But they did nothing, because it might have gotten in the way of holding the seat.
On primary night, Pittenger told family and friends that his loss was because of “ballot stuffers in Bladen” County. Pittenger’s aides subsequently told the executive director of the state party and an NRCC regional political director of their suspicions. An NRCC spokesperson denied that the committee had been notified, but interestingly enough, the regional political director who is now claiming not to have heard the complaints has been tapped as Harris’ chief of staff, should Harris end up being seated.
North Carolina Republican Party executive director Dallas "Oh god, it's mom" Woodhouse got real squirrelly about the issue:
In an interview this week, Woodhouse initially said he did not recall fielding complaints from Pittenger aides of possible fraud after the primary. But he called back a few moments later to say that he did remember hearing of anomalies — and took “a cursory look at the end of that race at the vote totals.” [...]
“If somebody said something about the absentee ballots, it is just very possible that it didn’t register with us,” Woodhouse said. “We had a lot of campaigns and a lot of people expressing concerns at the end of the election, and we were trying to quickly move on to the general election.”
Uh huh. “I didn’t hear about it. Wait, maybe I did, but all I did was glance at the vote totals and not look at the absentee ballots where the reported problems were, because I had elections to win.”
Republicans knew. This had been going on for several cycles, it wasn’t particularly subtle, they got complaints from one of their own incumbents, and they just charged ahead into the general election with the same fraudulent strategy in place.