Meanwhile in North Carolina

Because they can't win if they don't cheat...



Criminal investigation.

National Republicans are keeping their powder dry as an investigation into potential absentee ballot fraud in North Carolina throws into question a House seat that appeared to have been safely in Republican hands.

Last week, the North Carolina Board of Elections declined to certify Republican Mark Harris’s victory in the 9th Congressional District, citing claims of systemic ballot fraud. The Associated Press, which had called the race for Harris, subsequently retracted that call. Harris currently leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes. The details that have emerged since paint a picture of an absentee ballot operation in Bladen County that is, at the very least, sketchy, conducted by a man who worked as a subcontractor for Harris’s campaign.

If the investigation turns up concrete evidence of fraud, the board could opt not to certify the election and instead call for a rematch between Harris and McCready. Alternatively, Democratic leadership could refuse to seat Harris in January — Steny Hoyer, who will be House majority leader in January when Democrats officially take the majority, suggested as much on Tuesday.

[...]

President Donald Trump, who has accused multiple elections of being tainted by fraud, has also so far stayed publicly quiet, not tweeting or speaking to press about the investigation.

  Buzzfeed

The probe appears to focus on Bladen and Robeson counties, which each had unusually high rates of absentee ballot requests and unreturned absentee ballots.

[...]

The man at the center of an election fraud investigation in a North Carolina congressional race turned in nearly half of the requests for absentee ballots in a single county, records released Tuesday by the state's elections board show.

Leslie McCrae Dowless, a veteran political operative in Bladen County who was convicted of insurance fraud in 1992 and was connected to questionable absentee ballot activity in another election, is at the center of a probe into unusual activity in the county.

[...]

Dowless is also at the center of allegations that absentee ballots were tampered with.

[...]

North Carolina requires witnesses to sign absentee ballots. Usually, those witnesses are family members or friends. But a CNN review found three witnesses signed more than 40 ballots each, another signed 30 and three other people signed more than 10 apiece.

One of those people, Ginger Eason, told CNN affiliate WSOC that Dowless paid her between $75 and $100 per week to pick up finished absentee ballots. She said she handed them to Dowless and isn't sure what happened after that.

[...]

Emma Shipman, a Bladen County resident who filed an affidavit with the state elections board, said Tuesday that she'd had no interest in voting and wasn't sure why an absentee ballot had arrived -- but that she gave it to a woman who came to her door offering to help fill it out and turn it in.

Shipman said she doesn't know who she voted for.

"I don't know what happened," she said.

  CNN

Now two women intimately involved with the McCrae Dowless’s absentee ballot machine have revealed to BuzzFeed News its grim and chaotic workings, in which Dowless tracked votes on yellow paper and paid his workers, including family members, from stacks of cash, which some used to keep themselves high on opioids while they worked.

  Buzzfeed

This story has everything.

Bladen County Elections Director Cynthia Shaw stepped down last week, amid a state inquiry into the 2018 results, opting to leave one month before her scheduled retirement, according to WRAL.

[...]

[Two] women, both related to McCrae Dowless, paint a picture of American political chicanery at its lowest levels — though with sweeping consequences both for voters allegedly denied the franchise, and for the outcome of a pivotal national election, which Republican Mark Harris won by 905 votes.

Jessica Dowless described the scene in the small office at the intersection of two highways in Bethel, North Carolina, where she worked on Harris’s behalf for the last two months as chaotic. One worker, she said, “was so fucking high the other day she passed out at the fucking computer.” One of the workers who collected absentee ballots from residents was a “pill head,” she said.

[...]

She often worked six days a week tallying the number of Democrats and Republicans who had recently voted. However, she explained, there were times when she did not quite understand what she was doing or what the grand purpose was.

[...]

McCrae, she said, bought a woman who worked in the office “a car a week later after she started.” Another employee got a van that she used on the job, she said.

"Mark Harris was writing him checks left and right,” Jessica Dowless said, referring to McCrae, although she said she never saw the checks. McCrae, she said, “paid me a certain amount in cash and then the Board of Elections paid me the rest.”

[...]

McCrae’s workers “would come to your house, they would get you to fill out an absentee ballot to be sent to your house. They would go back and pick it up and then seal it and then find two witnesses. They [brought] them in and said for me to witness them and I told McCrae I didn’t want to do that but we had no else,” Jessica Dowless said, referring to the state law that requires all absentee ballots be witnessed by two people.

All the ballots that she saw come into the office were already sealed, she said.

[...]

Jessica Dowless, who also goes by her middle name Karen, said [Lisa Britt, McCrae’s step-daughter,] was part of that operation —which Britt vehemently denied to BuzzFeed News.

“I didn’t take any of them,” Britt said.

“Everybody thought they were helping Mr. Harris get elected,” Britt said. “As far as going and telling anybody who to vote for, we weren’t.”

“It didn’t affect me any way as to how people voted,” she said.

“I’m not giving a statement to you that can cause me to end up in prison, I’m really not sure about the legal aspects,” Britt said.

[...]

There is also criticism McCrae’s operation targeted black Democratic voters.

“That’s not true at all,” Britt said. “It’s not really that anyone was targeted, it’s that we were giving everybody the opportunity to vote. You’ve got more people in low income areas that don’t have a vehicle to go vote.”

Sure. The Republican candidate was interested in getting almost certain Democrat voters involved. Very believable.

“If we were gonna get those kind of people we could’ve gone to the pig processing plant and get them when they’re coming off work,” she added.

Britt’s mother, Sandra Dowless added they were trying to reach “just people with no rides.”

As Jessica Dowless put it: "I don’t know Democrat from Republican from a hole in my ass.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Handwritten notes obtained by WBTV suggest a second person ran an operation focused on absentee ballots in Bladen County in the 2018 primary election. The notes came from two people who collected the sheet of paper after a meeting on April 8, 2018 to discuss efforts in the primary race for Bladen County Sheriff. According to the two people who provided the notes to WBTV, the person who left the sheet of paper behind is Jeff Smith, a business owner and town commissioner in the county.

[...]

The notes left behind by Smith specifically refer to receiving payment in exchange for collecting unsealed absentee ballots. “Picking up existing ballots unsealed,” the top line of the sheet says, with the word “unsealed” underlined twice. Below that line are two lines of notes showing payment of $500 for 150 ballots and $1,000 for 250 ballots. The notes reference the same payment scheme for picking up new request forms from properly registered voters.

  WBTV

It's rats fcking themselves, all the way down.

  Charles P Pierce

UPDATE 2/27/19: