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| (Kevin Siers, The Charlotte Observer) |
State election officials in North Carolina said Monday that a political operative for Republican Mark Harris orchestrated a “coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” in the 9th Congressional District last year, hiding evidence of the operation as it unfolded and obstructing the state’s investigation after the election.
Those explosive charges opened an evidentiary hearing in Raleigh Monday, where the North Carolina State Board of Elections began listening to witness testimony to decide whether enough ballots were tampered with to taint the outcome of the 9th District race.
The state board’s executive director, Kim Strach, told the five-member board that Leslie McCrae Dowless, a longtime political operative from Bladen County, paid workers to collect absentee ballots from voters, a felony in North Carolina. Dowless and his employees in some cases forged voter and witness signatures and filled out blank or incomplete ballots, Strach said. They operated in both Bladen and Robeson counties, she said — submitting as many as 1,249 ballot request forms overall in the general election. It’s unclear exactly how many actual ballots Dowless and his associates turned in. (our emphasis)More testimony will be taken by the board over the coming days. The 5- member board of 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans would have to have a supermajority of 4 votes in order for them to call a new election. (Good luck getting a Republican to go along with the Democratic majority, even with overwhelming evidence of a rigged, unlawful election.) Given the lack of interest in the Republican Party in free and fair elections, should the board not be able to order a new election, Congress can step in and do so. The Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives has already put North Carolina on notice that it won't seat the Republican Harris while the election is under investigation.
To repeat what should be a well- known fact by now, the Republican Party is a collection of anti- democratic, white nationalist, hypocritical fraudsters and moral ciphers (and that's the short list) whose only mission in life is to protect the right- wing white political structure they've created through schemes such as the one that's been busted in North Carolina. There's no telling how many other elections at the local and state level have been tampered with to provide victories for Republicans. But we know when they can't pull it off with local talent alone, they contract with a hostile foreign government, who now has their asset installed in the White House.
