The man at the center of fraud probe in North Carolina may have been doing this for eight years

[DonViejo]

By Philip Bump

December 5 at 2:26 PM

In 2010, a political operative named Leslie McCrae Dowless received a little over $7,100 to provide get-out-the-vote services for a candidate running in and around Bladen County, N.C. That candidate won his race by a healthy margin overall, though he won a slightly lower percentage of mailed-in absentee votes than his overall margin.

Everywhere except Bladen County, anyway. Harold “Butch” Pope won his race with 67 percent of the vote, earning 52 percent of the mail-in absentee vote in his district. In Bladen, he won 81 percent of the absentee vote. And with that, he became the region’s new district attorney.

Dowless is now at the center of questions about his role in a much more important contest — the race for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District in this year’s midterms. Over the past several days, Dowless has been identified as the manager of an alleged effort to collect absentee ballots from voters in Bladen that may then have been altered by people other than the voters themselves.

Bladen County was the only county in the 9th District in which Republican candidate Mark Harris won a majority of mailed-in absentee votes last month. As was the case with Pope’s race in 2010, Harris’s support in mailed-in absentee votes was more than 20 percentage points higher than his performance in the rest of the district. It was in the primary, too, when Harris earned a stunning 98 percent of the mailed-in absentee votes in Bladen.

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/05/man-center-apparent-fraud-north-carolina-may-have-been-doing-this-eight-years/

[pecosbob]

1. We need to begin burrowing into all these nasty little warrens of Republican criminality

States reserve the right to determine their voting laws...it is also their responsibility to police the bad actors. The Federal government has the responsibility to ensure that the States' voting laws do not infringe upon their citizens' civil rights. When the gangsters are finally flushed from the Senate a new Voting rights Act needs to be passed.

[unc70]

2. Legislature changing law to put DA in charge of probe

A bill is in the NC General Assembly to shift investigation from Wake County to local jurisdiction -- Bladen County.

[rockfordfile]

3. That should tell you something about the "local DA"

[pecosbob]

4. My thoughts are that somewhere in this are grounds for a federal investigation

I know they gutted the Voting Rights Act, but there's got to be some federal statutes that touch on this. At the very least, people's civil rights were violated.