Republican officials had early warnings of voting irregularities in North Carolina
Source: Washington Post
Politics
Republican officials had early warnings of voting irregularities in North Carolina
By Amy Gardner and Beth Reinhard
December 6 at 2:25 PM
BLADENBORO, N.C. — When GOP Rep. Robert Pittenger lost his primary by a narrow margin in May, he suspected something was amiss. ... The congressman turned to a group of friends and family who had gathered with him on election night at a steakhouse near Charlotte and blamed the “ballot stuffers in Bladen,” according to three people at the gathering.
Pittenger’s concern stemmed from the vote tallies in rural Bladen County, where his challenger, a pastor from the Charlotte suburbs named Mark Harris, had won 437 absentee mail-in votes. Pittenger, a three-term incumbent, had received just 17.
In the days immediately after the race, aides to Pittenger told the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party and a regional political director for the National Republican Congressional Committee that they believed fraud had occurred, according to people familiar with their discussions.
GOP officials did little to scrutinize the results, instead turning their attention to Harris’s general-election campaign against a well-funded Democratic opponent, the people said. ... Their accounts provide the first indication that state and national Republican officials received early warnings about voting irregularities in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, now the subject of multiple criminal probes.
....
Reinhard reported from Washington. Justin Kase Conder in Bladenboro and Alice Crites, Mike DeBonis, Paul Kane and John Wagner in Washington contributed to this report.
Amy Gardner joined The Washington Post in 2005. She has worked stints in the Virginia suburbs, covered the 2010 midterms and the tea party revolution, and covered the Republican presidential nominating contest in 2011-2012. She was a politics editor for five years and returned to reporting in 2018. Follow https://twitter.com/AmyEGardner
Beth Reinhard is a reporter on the investigative team at The Washington Post. She previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, National Journal, the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post. Follow https://twitter.com/bethreinhard
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republican-officials-had-early-warnings-of-voting-irregularities-in-north-carolina/2018/12/06/b3e5c6d4-f8bf-11e8-8c9a-860ce2a8148f_story.html
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