The Republican Party, which uses "voter fraud" to justify voter- suppressing voter i.d. laws and purges of voter rolls, has been caught once again committing (allegedly!) voter fraud on a massive scale (our emphasis throughout):
DUBLIN, N.C. — In a low-slung, aging commercial strip across the street from an online-gaming parlor here, a local operative named Leslie McCrae Dowless ran his command center for Republican Mark Harris in the 9th Congressional District primary this spring.
Dowless sat at a desk at the back of one of the strip’s vacant storefronts, where he oversaw a crew of workers who collected absentee ballots from voters and updated the Harris campaign on the numbers, according to Jeff Smith, who is the building’s owner and a former Dowless friend. [snip]And, by "collected absentee ballots" they mean "collected and shitcanned Democratic absentee ballots":
Investigators with the bipartisan state elections board — which last week voted unanimously to delay certifying the race — have identified hundreds of potential witnesses to interview, many of them voters whose absentee ballots were never turned in, according to the people familiar with the probe. That raises the possibility of a weeks-long investigation and an uncertain start date for the next congressman from the 9th District.That Republican operative at the center of this, Dowless, he's seems nice:
Dowless, 62, who serves as vice chairman of the Bladen Soil and Water Conservation District, has a criminal record. Court records show he was convicted of fraud, perjury and passing a worthless check in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
He first came under scrutiny from the state elections board in 2016, when officials began investigating similar ballot irregularities, leading to a public hearing.
That year, in the 9th District primary election, Dowless was on the campaign payroll of Todd Johnson, a Union County insurance salesman who also won a curious number of the mail-in ballots in Bladen County: 211, compared with four for Harris, who was also a candidate that year, and just one for the incumbent, Rep. Robert Pittenger (R), records show. Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.There's fishy, and then there's... Fishy (click to enlarge):
There's more data and anecdotal evidence of voter fraud in this North Carolina Congressional District at the link above. The Democrats are going to court over it., while State election officials are working with the FBI and U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, and the State Bureau of Investigation is also on the case. ("Lock them up, lock them up!")
In Georgia, there's a special runoff election today (!!) with conservaDem John Barrow hoping to reverse some of the egregious voter suppression tactics of "Governor- elect" Brian Kemp. Turnout by Democrats and anyone interested in free and fair elections will be critical. A lawsuit filed by a voting rights group supporting Democrat Stacey Abrams alleges gross mismanagement of the recent runoff election. If Barrow is elected today, the lawsuit would provide fertile ground for making changes in Georgia's discriminatory election systems.
