Convicted felon with ties to Republican campaign reportedly paid woman to collect absentee ballots
She also says she didn't mail in the ballots she collected, delivering them directly to the GOP operative instead.
ADAM PECK DEC 4, 2018, 9:52 AM
As investigators continue to figure out what exactly transpired on Election Day in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district — where Republican candidate Mark Harris increasingly appears to be the beneficiary of one of the largest cases of election fraud in U.S. history — one name keeps coming up: Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr.
Dowless, who goes by McCrae, is a fixture in local North Carolina politics. He was elected vice chair of the Bladen County Soil and Water Conservation District, and has been attached to numerous Republican campaigns throughout the years, including the Harris campaign in 2018.
But Dowless is also a well-known convict. He served a six month prison sentence in the 1990s for a felony fraud conviction, and was indicted for perjury. His criminal record stretches back to the 1980s, and he has been implicated in previous schemes to illegally collect unreturned absentee ballots, most recently in 2016.
On Monday, local television station WSOCTV caught up with Ginger Eason, one of the canvassers whose signature frequently appeared on accepted absentee ballots as a witness. She told a reporter that she was paid between $75 and $100 per week by Dowless to pick up absentee ballots from around Bladen County.
https://thinkprogress.org/north-carolina-election-fraud-ballots-leslie-mccrae-dowless-c23755510bf6/