Posted on 12/07/2018 6:17:25 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The North Carolina State Board of Elections has refused to certify a Republican's slim victory, given credible allegations of cheating. M aybe ballot security isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Democrats, who the day before yesterday were insisting that voter fraud didn’t exist, now believe that it was used to steal a North Carolina congressional seat from them — and they may well be right.
Republican Mark Harris has a 905-vote lead over Democrat Dan McCready in the state’s 9th Congressional District, a slender victory that the State Board of Elections has refused to certify given credible allegations of cheating.
A consulting firm working for Harris contracted with an operative named McCrae Dowless based on his get-out-the-vote work, mostly involving his strange prowess with absentee ballots.
Dowless has a shady background that includes criminal convictions and a prior investigation of his election practices. His methods were seamy, at best.
Working from a storefront, he employed a crew to go door to door urging people to request absentee ballots. When they did, his team returned to collect the ballots, purportedly to deliver them to election officials but apparently to hand them over to Dowless first.
This is itself against the law in North Carolina, and rightly so. It destroys any chain of custody and creates the opportunity for more abuse and corruption. There is evidence that Dowless may have availed himself of it.
Bladen County, the largely rural area where Dowless focused his work, outpaced other counties in absentee-ballot requests — with 7.5 percent of registered voters making a request, higher than the 2 percent or so in most of the rest of the counties.
Weirdly, only 19 percent of absentee ballots in Bladen were submitted by Republicans, yet Harris managed to win 61 percent of the absentee vote there. He didn’t win absentees in any other county.
The implication is that Dowless may have pocketed absentee ballots not to his liking, particularly from black Democrats. If so, this would truly be a damnable — and literal — instance of “voter suppression.”
An election worker drops mail-in ballots into a ballot box at the Registrar of Voters office in San Diego, Calif., June 2018. (Mike Blake/Reuters) The North Carolina State Board of Elections has refused to certify a Republican's slim victory, given credible allegations of cheating. M aybe ballot security isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Democrats, who the day before yesterday were insisting that voter fraud didn’t exist, now believe that it was used to steal a North Carolina congressional seat from them — and they may well be right.
Republican Mark Harris has a 905-vote lead over Democrat Dan McCready in the state’s 9th Congressional District, a slender victory that the State Board of Elections has refused to certify given credible allegations of cheating.
A consulting firm working for Harris contracted with an operative named McCrae Dowless based on his get-out-the-vote work, mostly involving his strange prowess with absentee ballots.
Dowless has a shady background that includes criminal convictions and a prior investigation of his election practices. His methods were seamy, at best.
Working from a storefront, he employed a crew to go door to door urging people to request absentee ballots. When they did, his team returned to collect the ballots, purportedly to deliver them to election officials but apparently to hand them over to Dowless first.
This is itself against the law in North Carolina, and rightly so. It destroys any chain of custody and creates the opportunity for more abuse and corruption. There is evidence that Dowless may have availed himself of it.
Bladen County, the largely rural area where Dowless focused his work, outpaced other counties in absentee-ballot requests — with 7.5 percent of registered voters making a request, higher than the 2 percent or so in most of the rest of the counties.
Weirdly, only 19 percent of absentee ballots in Bladen were submitted by Republicans, yet Harris managed to win 61 percent of the absentee vote there. He didn’t win absentees in any other county.
The implication is that Dowless may have pocketed absentee ballots not to his liking, particularly from black Democrats. If so, this would truly be a damnable — and literal — instance of “voter suppression.”
The Harris margin over McCready in Bladen County (162 votes) is considerably less than his overall margin. Yet there was almost certainly illegality in a very close election, and if Dowless was discarding or destroying ballots, the number of affected votes may go higher.
North Carolina law sets a standard for a revote that doesn’t require a finding that cheating changed the outcome. The election board can order a new election if improprieties occurred that “taint the result” and “cast doubt on its fairness.” Pending the conclusion of the board’s investigation, it’s hard to see how that standard won’t be met.
Republicans won’t like it, but they should probably want to start over, for the sake of the integrity of their own nominating process, if nothing else. In the GOP primary for the seat, Harris won an equally narrow victory over the Republican incumbent and an even more smashing Dowless-engineered victory in Bladen absentee ballots, 437 to 17.
The larger lesson here is that people will exploit vulnerabilities in the election system, and it should be as secure as possible. Absentee voting is a particular soft spot. It occurs outside the watch of election officials, and it’s impossible to determine what happens to the ballot in between the time it leaves and returns.
Although usually not as extensive or consequential as what may have transpired in North Carolina’s 9th District, vote fraud often involves absentee voting, and exploiting poor and vulnerable voters. In October, four people were indicted in Texas on 30 felony counts of targeting elderly voters in a fraudulent mail-in voter scheme.
Rules should be rigorous, and it’s insane that the sort of vote harvesting that Dowless engaged in — i.e., a private party collecting the ballots of voters — is perfectly legal in California.
The North Carolina race demonstrates how even relatively small-scale cheating — no one will ever mistake McCrae Dowless for a major player — can undermine faith in our system. And how, if anyone doubted it, voter fraud is real.
“Rules for me but not for thee” screams out its reality in this situation.
No need to read the article given this stunning revelation by Rich Lowry. I’ve known this since JFK was elected in 1960.
You better believe there is widespread voter fraud. The risks are negligible. But the rewards are great. Money, power, contracts, jobs, fame.
But there wasn’t any cheating in the seven CA races that flipped from “late voting”?
"REPUBLICANS ARE COMMITTING ELECTION FRAUD IN NORTH CAROLINA!!! HARVESTING BALLOTS!!! THEY'RE STEALING THE ELECTION!!!"
"Didn't Democrats do the same exact thing in California?"
"IT'S LEGAL IN CALIFORNIA!!!"
Accepting votes any more leniently than this is insane.
Another situation....walk in early voting. It's done at county election headquarters, not in individual cities and towns. It's actually a good solution which avoids "missing ballots" and "lost ballots". There's a lot of scrutiny of that process.
For some reason this reminds me of the Presidential election in 2000 when it came down to the Florida hanging chad fiasco. even before it was settled jessie jackson was screaming about Republican voter fraud. At one point a reporter asked him if al gore were to win would he still feel there was voter fraud and he replied “no”.......and he didn’t even realize what he had just admitted to.
Working from a storefront, he employed a crew to go door to door urging people to request absentee ballots. When they did, his team returned to collect the ballots, purportedly to deliver them to election officials but apparently to hand them over to Dowless first.
This is itself against the law in North Carolina, and rightly so. It destroys any chain of custody and creates the opportunity for more abuse and corruption. There is evidence that Dowless may have availed himself of it.
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That practice is the law of the land in CA.
And in Arizona. I believe ‘ballot-harvesting’ is illegal here.
“Money, power, contracts, jobs, fame”
Umm, control of the nuclear weapons stockpile?
Do we really want to tell the planet that we have given the power of planetary annihilation to someone elected by fraud?
Voter Fraud is Real and will be given a complete pass by ‘both’ parties.
The re-thugs bluff has been called and they will fold.
I was a bit surprised when Harris won this seat given the other losses by house republicans, along with the manufacturing of McCready’s image as a moderate (veteran, small businessman, blah, blah blah). I voted for Pittenger in the primary, despite his occasional weaselly ways, because I pegged Harris as a career loser as a politician. Maybe there’s a good reason he’s a “former” pastor.
A search on the NR neocon, neverTrumper site for “fraud” brings up three articles on NC and none on Cali on the first two pages of search results.
https://www.nationalreview.com/?s=fraud&orderby=date&order=desc
If you don’t think so, just look at Cauliphonya. Officially a one party state. Soon to be Mexico’s northernmost province.
This really PISSES ME OFF!! Where the hell is the AG?! MEXifornia was stolen and NOT one idiot of outcry from the RNC!! And what about AZ, Nevada and Montana? My God the 2020 presidential election WILL BE STOLEN exactly as many races were!! This is just a trial run for the dirty evil demonic cheating dirty rats to cheat Trump in 2020! Believe me they are already planning way ahead to use this strategy formula to steal every seats in the upcoming election in 2020! Trump and the republicans WON’T STAND A CHANCE!! They have the rogue black robes to back them up!! Scary crap!!
Let’s ask the first Korean female in Congress what she thinks of this. Oh wait...
This is how you conduct war. The Rats stole 2 Senate Seats, a Governor, 20 House Seats and countless important down ballot offices. It was obvious so the Rats go on total offense and put the attention on the NC House Seat. MSM including FNC going wall to wall on it. Meanwhile the GOP is don’t nothing about the the stolen races all over the country. As usual they bring marshmallows to a gunfight.
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