Three lessons from North Carolina's tainted election

[struggle4progress]

By Michael Bitzer
February 25 at 6:30 AM

... , an audit by North Carolina’s Board of Elections after the 2016 election not only showed that voter fraud is exceedingly rare but warned of the very different type of fraud that occurred in the 9th District. The audit identified only 508 “voting irregularities” out of 4.8 million ballots cast, or one ten-thousandth of a percent. Most irregularities involved votes by felons, which is illegal in North Carolina, while a small number involved noncitizens with legal status attempting to vote. Only two cases of voter impersonation were referred to prosecutors.

In that same audit, the board noted “irregularities affecting absentee by-mail voting” in the same part of the 9th District (Bladen County). This involved witnesses who signed multiple absentee mail ballots. In fact, the man at the center of the 2018 controversy — Leslie McCrae Dowless — brought the 2016 allegations but ended up implicating himself in a ballot harvesting operation. The board unanimously referred the suspected criminal activity to federal prosecutors ...

In “Election Fraud,” the political scientists Michael Alvarez, Thad Hall and Susan Hyde note that catching election fraud requires “a transparent electoral process and high-quality data reported in a timely manner.” This is exactly where North Carolina excels ...

... the very public records that can identify potential irregularities can also be used to manipulate voters. Within the daily data released by the state board, a voter who requests an absentee mail-in ballot has his or her address included. Campaigns can track those voters, sending them campaign brochures or information, or potentially have campaign workers show up. This was the harvesting method Dowless used ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/25/three-lessons-north-carolinas-tainted-election-what-comes-next/?utm_term=.55f2e1e50f86

[struggle4progress]

1. Investigators seek phone, bank data after NC 9th district fight

By The Associated Press
Posted at 2:27 PM

RALEIGH — North Carolina criminal investigators are seeking phone and bank records as they dig into ballot fraud allegations that forced an election re-do in the country’s last undetermined congressional seat.

Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said Tuesday the search warrants and what agents collected remain sealed from the public.

Court clerks records show the State Bureau of Investigation collected financial records for an unidentified suspect in December and sought phone records last month. Judges both times agreed the name of the suspect and details of the Bladen County case should be kept secret ...

https://www.thetimesnews.com/news/20190226/investigators-seek-phone-bank-data-after-nc-9th-district-fight

[struggle4progress]

2. McConnell thinks NC election fraud is a case for voter ID

The Senate Majority Leader’s remarkably dishonest spin.
By Aaron Rupar
Feb 26, 2019, 2:40pm EST

... McConnell tried to pin blame for absentee ballot fraud that allegedly helped Republican Mark Harris narrowly prevail in last November’s election in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District on Democrats, because Democrats don’t support voter ID laws. But what McConnell didn’t acknowledge is that voter ID laws like the one already on the books in North Carolina are powerless to stop the sort of election fraud in question.

“For years and years, every Republican who dared to call for commonsense safeguards for Americans’ ballots was demonized by Democrats and their allies,” McConnell said. “We were hit with left-wing talking points insisting that voter fraud wasn’t real. ‘Never happens,’ they said.

“Now that an incident of very real voter fraud has become national news and the Republican candidate seems to have benefited, these longstanding Democratic talking points have been really quiet. Haven’t heard much from Democrats lately about how fraud really happens,” McConnell continued.

The irony is that during a trial about North Carolina’s voter ID law in early 2016, a political science professor explicitly warned it was powerless to prevent a real issue: fraud involving absentee ballots ...

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/26/18241652/mitch-mcconnell-north-carolina-election-fraud-scandal

[sprinkleeninow]

6. Ain't gonna stop this kinda election FRAUD perpetrated by REPUBLICANS.

macturdle is full of hovno past his hairline.

He do 'twisting' good.

[struggle4progress]

3. McConnell finds a novel villain: Democrats

By Philip Bump
February 26 at 1:56 PM

... “The wrongdoing seemed to have benefited the Republican candidate over the Democrat,” he continued. “Just last week we saw the state Board of Elections unanimously call for a new election.”

McConnell is not one to misspeak, particularly when reading from prepared remarks. His “seemed to have benefited” here is intentional, an effort not to withhold judgment but to cast doubt.

There’s no evidence at all that the Democratic candidate in the race, Dan McCready, benefited from any illegal activity. There’s no evidence that any illegal absentee ballot collection or alteration was conducted by anyone beside Dowless and his employees. And Dowless wasn’t just a volunteer, randomly picking his targets: He was being paid by the Harris campaign. The way his efforts came to light was that results in one county, Bladen County, seemed way out of whack from other counties — to Harris’s benefit ...

“Now Madame President,” he continued, speaking to the senator overseeing the morning’s proceedings, “for years and years, every Republican who dared to call for common-sense safeguards for Americans’ ballots was demonized by Democrats and their allies. We were hit with left-wing talking points insisting that voter fraud wasn’t real. Never happens, they said. That fraud just didn’t happen. That modest efforts to ensure that voters are who they say they are and are voting in a proper place were really some sinister right-wing plot to prevent people from voting” ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/26/mitch-mcconnell-has-found-real-culprit-north-carolinas-fraud-riddled-election-democrats/?utm_term=.993bf19f9c8c

[struggle4progress]

4. NC special election isn't just about 9th District

Posted Feb 26, 2019 5:04 AM
Simone Pathé

... In a nationalized political environment, the outcome would contribute to the narrative about North Carolina heading into 2020, when GOP Sen. Thom Tillis is up for his first re-election. Inside Elections rates the Senate race Tilts Republican. The demographically shifting state is also a must-win for Trump, who carried it by less than 4 points in 2016.

Republicans fear a divisive and messy 9th District primary in a high-profile special election could jeopardize the seat and complicate their efforts in other federal races next year.

“The only question is if Republicans are going to continue with a fiasco in the primary process or get focused on circling the wagons and winning elections in 2020,” said Paul Shumaker, a North Carolina-based consultant who worked for former 9th District Rep. Robert Pittenger and also counts Tillis among his clients.

Democrats have the advantage of time and money. McCready has been consistently fundraising — raising more than $500,000 by the end of 2018 — well before the new election was called for ...

https://www.rollcall.com/news/campaigns/2020-around-corner-north-carolina-special-election-isnt-just-9th-district

[struggle4progress]

5. Moment of truth

We don’t know much about John Harris. We don’t know his politics — or even if he’s that interested in politics. We do know he’s 29 years old and he is an assistant U.S. attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina. And, of course, his father is Mark Harris ...

“I told him that collecting absentee ballots was a felony,” John Harris said, “and I would send him the statute that collecting ballots was a felony.” He did so, and he asked pointedly if his father would be comfortable with the methods Dowless used being broadcast in the media ...

It clearly wasn’t easy testimony to provide, and maybe it shouldn’t be considered an extraordinary thing. But truth has become a malleable commodity in politics, something that’s shaped and pruned to fit the agenda of the day. So it has been with Mark Harris and other Republicans, particularly NCGOP officials who for weeks have tried to focus only on the pieces of the truth — legal votes — that would get Harris seated in Congress. That is, until Mark Harris called for a new election Thursday. Moments later, NCGOP chair Robin Hayes declared: “The people of North Carolina deserve nothing less than the full confidence and trust in the electoral system” ...

We wonder if John Harris was tempted to do the same Wednesday, to mold the truth and find a seam that would allow him both not to damage his career and not to hurt his father. Instead, he said what he knew, with a clarity and honesty that any father should want. It was the right, hard thing to do, and when the questioning was done, John Harris had a few final words for the hearing. He said he loved his mother and his father, and he said they’d made mistakes. He said that everyone, in both parties, has to come up with a way to transcend our partisan politics ...

https://wcfcourier.com/opinion/editorial/moment-of-truth-in-election-fraud-case/article_97f35e8f-49b3-5df8-b02b-ffdc19b1fd70.html

[Awsi Dooger]

7. Republicans cheat

Republicans cheat
Republicans cheat