North Carolina elections board identifies 'person of interest' in fraud probe
Source: Reuters
POLITICS DECEMBER 7, 2018 / 2:55 PM / UPDATED 12 MINUTES AGO
(Reuters) - North Carolina’s board of elections identified political consultant Leslie McCrae Dowless as a person of interest on Friday amid a probe of possible absentee ballot fraud in a disputed U.S. congressional election.
The board has refused to certify Republican Mark Harris as the winner of the Nov. 6 election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as it investigates possible fraud involving absentee ballots from two rural counties.
In a statement, the board said it has assigned four investigators to the probe and issued subpoenas to the Red Dome Group, a consulting firm that Dowless performed work for, along with the Harris campaign committee and the campaign for a local Bladen County sheriff candidate.
Residents in rural Bladen County have provided sworn affidavits that people came to their homes to collect absentee ballots they had not filled in. In North Carolina, it is illegal for a third party to turn in absentee ballots.
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North Carolina’s ‘Guru of Elections’: Can-Do Operator Who May Have Done Too Much
By Richard Fausset, Alan Blinder, Sydney Ember, Timothy Williams and Serge F. Kovaleski
Dec. 8, 2018
L. McCrae Dowless Jr., who headed a get-out-the-vote operation in rural North Carolina, at his home in Bladenboro on Friday. Veasey Conway for The New York Times
BLADENBORO, N.C. — Adam Delane Thompson wanted to vote but was not sure what to do with the absentee ballots he received in the mail this year for him, his fiancée and his daughter. So for guidance he called an old friend in Bladenboro, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., a low-level local official with a criminal record who nonetheless had once been feted as “guru of elections” in Bladen County.
Mr. Dowless soon had the sealed ballots in his hands and was off to the post office to mail them, Mr. Thompson said.
Mr. Thompson, who works in the maintenance department at a DuPont plant, said in an interview he was grateful. But the act was apparently illegal in North Carolina, where, except in limited circumstances, it is a felony to collect another person’s absentee ballot.
In this rural region near the state’s southern border, where candidates are often intimately known as neighbors, friends or enemies, Mr. Dowless ran a do-it-all vote facilitating business that was part of the community fabric.
While cash-driven voter turnout efforts are a cottage industry in campaign seasons, Mr. Dowless’s operation appeared to run like a family business that crossed lines laid out in election law.
Dozens of interviews and an examination of thousands of pages of documents portray Mr. Dowless, a former car salesman, as a local political opportunist who was quick to seek ballots, collect them or offer rides to the polls. He employed a network of part-time helpers, some of them his own relatives, who, lured by promises of swift cash payments, would fan out across southeastern North Carolina in get-out-the-vote efforts for whichever candidate happened to be footing that year’s bill.
