After four days of hearings in the uncalled 9th District race in North Carolina, the state elections board has called for a new election after finding significant evidence of an illegal ballot harvesting scheme paid for by Mark Harris, the Republican candidate.
Harris' own son, John, an attorney, testified he had warned him early in the race to avoid McCrae Dowless, the ringleader of the operation, because of suspicious vote totals in previous races he'd worked on.
https://www.wral.com/after-harris-admissions-a-new-election-in-9th-district/18208305/
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The email produced by the attorney representing Harris' campaign showed Harris reaching out to Judge Marion Warren about procuring Dowless' help. Dowless worked for another candidate, Todd Johnson, who nearly swept Bladen County's absentee ballot totals in 2016, and Harris refers to that victory in his email.
"On the other issue of your gracious offer to meet me in Bladen County and spend a day connecting me to the 'key people' that can help me carry that part of the county in a future US House NC-9 race," Harris wrote to Warren on March 8, 2017. "You know the political and financial connections better than anyone else I would know, including the guy whose absentee ballot project for Johnson could have put me in the US House this term, had I known, and he had been helping us."
Normally, a new race would feature the same two candidates, but the legislature changed the law last December to re-do the primaries as well. I'm glad the crooks got caught!
