On Thursday, after four days of hearings into charges that Republican Mark Harris benefitted from an illegal absentee ballot scheme in last year’s race for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, the bipartisan state Board of Elections unanimously voted to hold a new election. This will be the first time a re-vote has occurred in a House race since 1974, when a malfunctioning voting machine was enough to cast doubt on Republican Henson Moore’s 44-vote win in a contest in Louisiana; Moore decisively won the do-over the following year.
Democrat Dan McCready, a businessman and retired Marine, has long been preparing to compete here again, and there’s no question his fellow Democrats will give him the chance to try once more. There’s far more uncertainty, however, on the GOP side. Last year, the Republican-led state legislature passed a law mandating new primaries whenever a new election is ordered in a congressional contest. That’s a change from prior practice, which would have required only a new general election be held between the existing nominees—something that would have left the GOP stuck with Harris. On Thursday, McCready’s attorney, Marc Elias, declined to say if he’d challenge this new law in court.
If there’s a new Republican primary, Harris is likely to face plenty of opposition if he runs again. That’s a big if, though: Harris, who said at Thursday’s hearing that he’d suffered two strokes in January and was “struggling” to make it through his testimony as a witness, has not yet said what he’ll do, though after the board’s vote, his wife said “we will think about” another bid.
It will be up to the board, rather than Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, to schedule this new race. However, it’s possible that the new election for the 9th District will be held the same day as the pending special election for the 3rd District, which became open after GOP Rep. Walter Jones died last week. Since Cooper is tasked with scheduling the 3rd District vote, he may end up having a say in when voters in the 9th District will go to the polls if the board chooses to follow his lead.
The board’s vote to hold a new election capped off a dramatic week of proceedings that were nothing but a disaster for Harris. On Wednesday, his own son, federal prosecutor John Harris, testified that he'd warned his father about McCrae Dowless, the operative accused of masterminding the illegal absentee ballot harvesting operation on behalf of Harris’ campaign.
Then on Thursday, board members were furious to find out that Harris’ team had failed to produce relevant documents pursuant to their subpoena, including one message in which Harris specifically asked a friend to connect him to Dowless because he was “the guy whose absentee ballot project ... could have put me in the US House this term.”
In his own testimony before the board on Thursday, Harris sought to throw his son under the bus, saying, “I’m his dad, and I know he’s a little judgmental, and has a little taste of arrogance.” He also professed a shocking ignorance of basic campaign finance laws: Harris initially paid Dowless through an “independent expenditure PAC” (often known as a “super PAC”) but said he was not aware that congressional campaigns are not permitted to coordinate their activities with such PACs.
Harris evidently saw which way things were going after investigators spent days carefully laying out their evidence, and in a shocking twist on Thursday afternoon, he himself called for a new election. However, that move only came after Harris had spent months demanding he be seated. Indeed, earlier this month, Harris told a meeting of the state GOP executive committee, “The Democrats and liberal media have spared no expense disparaging my good name,” and even called allegations of ballot fraud “unsubstantiated slandering.”
Harris was far from the only Republican to assert that, despite evidence to the contrary, that he was the duly elected winner. Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the state GOP, also loudly insisted that Harris deserved to go to Congress, a stance he maintained as recently as Wednesday. Woodhouse attended the hearings with a whiteboard and said he was using it to keep track of the number of ballots witnesses said were manipulated or were under suspicion, wrongly claiming there weren’t enough votes to call into question Harris’ 905-vote lead. Every member of the state Board of Elections—and, ultimately, Harris himself—very much disagreed.
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