The 2018 midterm elections are not yet over.
North Carolina’s State Board of Elections voted Thursday to throw out the results of the election held in November in the state’s 9th Congressional District after the candidate who led in the vote, Mark Harris, suddenly agreed that a new election was warranted. Harris had resisted a do-over, claiming that fraud allegedly perpetrated on his behalf through the manipulation of absentee ballots would not have been enough to affect the outcome of the contest (which may or may not be true). After Harris’s son testified Wednesday that he’d warned his father about the election worker accused of committing the fraud — and after Harris admitted having failed to turn over emails from his son to investigators — Harris agreed to support a new election.
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This is probably the first federal election in which the results were tainted by fraudulent activity.
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Yet here, where the alleged fraud involved absentee ballots (which an expert told me in 2014 was a potential threat to the integrity of elections), there has been almost no outcry from Republican elected officials. Trump hasn’t mentioned the situation in North Carolina. A review of congressional tweets shows no Republican officials who have linked the events in the 9th District to their party’s campaign against voter fraud — and plenty of Democrats who have noted that silence.
A federal election will be rerun because of fraud. Republicans aren’t talking about it much.
There was the way Harris structured his campaign so that Dowless, the operative, would be paid by a middleman consulting firm called Red Dome Group, preventing the payments from showing up on federal campaign reports.
There was the lack of oversight by either Harris or Red Dome of Dowless’s activities. Their accounting records show that he was paid for legal activities such as get-out-the-vote work and legal collection of absentee-ballot request forms. Demanding that he document his work would have revealed that he wasn’t spending much of his time on those activities.
There were suspected campaign finance violations by the Harris campaign that the board staff plans to forward to the Federal Election Commission.
All of it added up to a worrisome scenario, Lawson and others said, that should never be allowed to take place in a congressional election.
“Had I had the opportunity to continue the cross-examination, and also put on further evidence, it would have become even clearer how deep the fraud scheme ran and the involvement of all the players,” said Elias, McCready’s lawyer.
He added: “It’s important that people not take Dr. Harris’s statements on the stand as an act of graciousness. His statements were the actions of a desperate man who had been caught in a lie who was trying to figure out how to get out of that.”
Scrutiny of the fraud allegations is not over. On Saturday, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman told The Washington Post that she plans within 30 days to begin presenting evidence regarding the 2016 and 2018 elections to a grand jury.
In N.C., a surprise: In the end, everyone agreed it was election fraud
After being caught in a lie, Republican candidate Harris - who was ahead in the count - threw in the towel and requested a new election. Despite the evidence now on the record, Harris might be the candidate again, but only if he beats a primary challenge from Republican ranks (and isn't indicted first).
But let me draw your attention to this bit:
Under a provision in North Carolina election law, the board has the power to call for a new election even without reaching the threshold to alter the margin of victory. The provision is meant for circumstances where fraud is sufficiently problematic — for instance if a campaign or a public official is aware of it — to cast a general “taint” on the integrity of the results.
They *may* call for a new election when they find that a campaign was aware of voter fraud if they deem it "sufficiently problematic"? That's not good enough. In my opinion, it should either be an automatic invalidation of the election results and a new election, and/or the campaign and the candidate should be disqualified and not allowed to run again.
Your thoughts?
