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North Carolina Election Scandal To Conclude With ‘Battle Of The Dans’

North Carolina Election Scandal To Conclude With ‘Battle Of The Dans’

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

After an election fraud scandal, North Carolina Republicans lost a House candidate. After an indictment and questions about possible bribery, the state GOP lost its chair.

But all that didn’t stop a gaggle of Republicans from vying for the chance to run for a House seat that, thanks to gerrymandering, still favors their party — that is, of course, if voters stay interested in a special election that now will be decided on September 10, if everything goes as planned.

Whatever happens, the race has offered a national blueprint for what voters will see in 2020, with the majority of Republicans clinging close to Donald Trump and trying to brand Democrats as far to the left as imagination allows. Meanwhile, Democrats proclaim their independence and ability to stand up to the president and his bending of constitutional norms while doing the other business of Congress and helping constituents.

In North Carolina’s 9th District, state Sen. Dan Bishop avoided a runoff by taking close to 50 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s GOP primary, which featured a scrum of candidates whose primary mission was showing who was most loyal to Trump and his policies.

Bishop will next face Democrat Dan McCready, the former Marine who ran unopposed in his primary, and two third-party candidates.

McCready was the Democratic nominee for the seat last fall when he at first appeared to have narrowly lost to Republican Mark Harris. An investigation of that election found irregularities and possible illegal activities regarding absentee ballots cast on behalf of Harris, a former Baptist pastor, and a do-over was ordered. Citing health issues, Harris bowed out of the special election.

In a campaign that looked to the general, Bishop of Mecklenburg County broadcast TV ads that tried to link McCready with Democrats in Washington, such as the right’s favorite villain, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Expect to see his label for them, “clowns,” pop up again through the summer.

McCready’s team has labeled efforts to make him a part of some supposed Washington left-wing agenda as ridiculous, pointing to his pledges to work across the aisle. He also cited his military experience as proof of his ability to work with folks from different backgrounds. He’s been accused of being fuzzy on the details of his own positions, a charge sure to reappear between now and September.

The 9th District race drew national money, on behalf of different candidates. In primary debates, though, when it came to policy, the Republicans were emphatically on the same page. To answer the problem of gun violence, especially relevant in a state still mourning those killed and injured in a shooting at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the candidates’ solutions were more guns, in the hand of the “good guys” and increased mental health services.

Stony Rushing, a county commissioner in Union County, which also contains huge chunks of voters in the circuitous district, portrayed the scandal that brought down Harris as a hit job. (Harris had endorsed his candidacy.) The gun range owner emphasized gun rights and his pro-life credentials in the race, and landed in second place.

Bishop is the proud sponsor of North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill,” or HB2, which required people, in public buildings, to use bathrooms that matched the gender on their birth certificates. (The law has since been repealed.) He would like to move on from that legislation, which drove businesses and entertainment and sporting events from North Carolina before it was changed.

But McCready is reminding voters of that bill and the negative national and international attention it brought. And North Carolina Democrats won’t let anyone forget the scandal that caused the special election, which brought more negative attention to the state.

Yet Bishop’s HB2 stance might resonate with the GOP base. That’s important, as this race ultimately will be decided on turnout and passion. The September general election, though it will be closely watched, will clash with a new school year and more pressing concerns of those seeking a rest from politics. Democrats no doubt were hoping for a runoff, which would have pushed the general election to Nov. 5, coinciding with municipal elections in Charlotte, a heavily Democratic city.

No matter how low the turnout, the battle of the Dans will certainly preview 2020 races across the country, with Republicans trying to take down those first-term Democrats who won last fall in GOP-leaning districts, many of which Trump won in 2016, by portraying them as extreme. Some of those Democrats have already tried to insulate themselves from that line of attack, joining together to proclaim their independence and service to districts they represent.

Trump loyalty as a strategy in North Carolina, a politically divided state whose blue cities are constantly at odds with more conservative rural and suburban areas, is not a sure thing, though it makes more sense in congressional races, with gerrymandered districts being challenged in the courts.

Trump won North Carolina in 2016, yet Democrats wistfully remember President Barack Obama’s narrow win in 2008 and his narrow loss to Mitt Romney in 2012. So they have hope, though when Washington Democrats act cautiously in order not to scare away moderate Democrats, one of the places they are thinking about is North Carolina.

Though North Carolina’s embarrassingly delayed 9th District race failed to excite many voters Tuesday — turnout was less than 10 percent — expect to see copycat campaigns in a 2020 election season that will make 2016 look tame by comparison.

Mary C. Curtis is a columnist for Roll Call. An award-winning journalist, she has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, and as national correspondent for Politics Daily. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

IMAGE: Dan McCready, who won the Democratic nomination in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District on Tuesday.

 

Report: Justice Department Probing North Carolina Election Fraud

Report: Justice Department Probing North Carolina Election Fraud

The troubles are not yet over for Republicans in North Carolina’s 9th District, where state election officials nullified the 2018 midterm results and called for a new election after finding evidence that the GOP congressional candidate’s campaign engaged in rampant election fraud.

In fact, the problems for those North Carolina Republicans may just be getting started — because federal investigators are now probing the fraud, a local North Carolina television station reportedon Monday.

A grand jury has been convened, according to the report, and the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section has now issued at least three subpoenas in the case.

Those who received subpoenas include:

  • The campaign of Mark Harris, the GOP nominee in the 2018 House race.
  • McCrae Dowless, the man accused of carrying out the election fraud for Harris’ campaign. Dowless was arrested at the end of February and indicted on multiple charges related to the election fraud, which involved illegally collecting absentee ballots and either altering them or discarding them.
  • The North Carolina State Board of Elections, which is required to produce “all documents related to the investigation of election irregularities affecting counties within the 9th Congressional District.” The NCSBOE conducted its own investigation of the fraud — which led to its decision to hold new elections — and thus would have documents and evidence relevant to federal investigators.

Republicans, for their part, have mostly been silent on their party’s election fraud.

And if they haven’t been silent, they’ve been twisting the facts of the case to blame the fraud on Democrats. Of course, Democrats had nothing to do with the fact that Republicans in North Carolina tried to steal an election.

In one instance, the state Republican Party even tried to raise money off the fraud.

Now, however, Republicans will have to campaign in a new election in the 9th District under a cloud of federal investigation. We’ll soon see how they’ll try to spin that.

 

Official Uncovers Election Fraud Scheme In North Carolina

Official Uncovers Election Fraud Scheme In North Carolina

An investigation by North Carolina election officials has uncovered evidence of an illegal election-rigging scheme orchestrated by an operative working for Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris.

“The evidence will show that a coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme operated during the 2018 general election,” North Carolina State Board of Elections Executive Director Kim Strach said in her opening statement of a Monday hearing to consider the evidence of election fraud.

Investigators have been looking into suspicious circumstances surrounding the race in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, where the most recent tally of results showed Harris ahead of Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes.

The state board of elections refused to certify those results and declare Harris as the winner after evidence emerged that McCrae Dowless, an operative hired by Harris, illegally collected mail-in ballots from voters in order to throw them away or alter them.

Harris won 61 percent of the mail-in vote in Bladen County, but Republicans made up only 19 percent of the voters who registered to vote by mail. NPR noted, “For Harris to have ended up with that 61 percent, he would have had to win every single Republican and unaffiliated voter and some registered Democrats as well.”

Strach said that the evidence — which includes testimony to investigators from 140 voters and 30 witnesses — shows Dowless paid people to pick up ballots, and took other actions designed to “obstruct the investigation and testimony provided at this hearing.”

One woman who testified in the hearing, Lisa Britt, signed her name as a witness to many of the ballots illegally turned in by Dowless. She said the Republican operative paid her between $150 and $175 for every 50 absentee ballot request forms she picked up, and said Dowless instructed her to fill in blanks for races on the ballots she took in.

After the election, Dowless reportedly told his hires not to admit to the illegal ballot collection. A typed-out form, which Britt said Dowless gave her, instructed ballot collectors to refuse to testify to investigators and to plead the Fifth if necessary.

The national Republican Party, led by Trump, has often baselessly accused Democrats of stealing elections. But the North Carolina case shows Republicans doing just that — at the same time as the national party pushes for laws to restrict voting to help them win elections.

Harris is also a Republican very much in the bigoted mold of Trump. Harris has said Muslims worship “the anti-Christ,” argued Jews and Muslims should convert to Christianity, and once delivered a sexist sermon that said women should be subservient.

Democrats in the House leadership have said they would refuse to seat Harris until the election fraud dispute is resolved.

As Republicans desperately tried to keep control of Congress in the 2018 midterms, they lied and pushed absurd fantasies about Democrats stealing elections.

When the dust settled, they still lost — and the only race actually stolen was a scheme put together by Republican operatives.

Published with permission of The American Independent. 

IMAGE: Mark Harris, Republican Congressional candidate in North Carolina’s 9th District.