Tomorrow is the Special Election to fill the congressional seat from North Carolina's 9th district, which has been vacant since the apparent winner, Republican Mark Harris, was never seated. A bipartisan commission directed that a new election be held after investigating allegations of absentee vote fraud on the part of the Harris campaign. I wrote about the scheme here. In North Carolina, lists of voters who have requested an absentee ballot is public information, and, during the absentee voting period, the names of voters who have not yet returned their ballot is public as well. Harris had hired an operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr., who, according to testimony before the commission, paid associates of his to visit the homes of people with unreturned absentee ballots and offer to collect them. This violated a state election law concerning who may handle an absentee ballot. The pay rate was $125 for every 50 ballots illegally collected, a detail that reminded me of what James Carville once said can be drudged up by dragging a 20-dollar bill through a trailer court. Dowless is pictured above, along with some of his "campaign workers," including those who did the "leg work." They look like the last thing you saw before waking up in a bloody bath tub with one kidney.
Dowless, who was subsequently indicted, pleaded the Fifth Amendment before the commission, and the details of what happened to the illegally collected ballots aren't certain. However, Dowless only operated in two counties—the only two counties in the district in which Harris won a majority of the absentee ballots cast. Moreover, those same two counties had an unusually high percentage of unreturned absentee ballots. It seems likely that the illegally collected ballots that were marked for Harris were witnessed and mailed in from a post office near the voter's home, and that those marked for Dan McCready, the Democrat, were ashcanned. In the election night count, Harris won by 905 votes.
In tomorrow's Special Election, McCready, an Iraq war veteran, is again the Democratic candidate. Harris is obviously damaged goods and has been replaced by Dan Bishop, who, if the Wikipedia article on him is half true, qualifies as a recognizable type of right-wing nut job: LGBT activists are the American Taliban, Black Lives Matters is a neo Nazi movement, etc. Trump carried the district by a double-digit margin, but his statewide margin was less than 4 points, so another close outcome in the 9th district tomorrow would suggest that both he and incumbent Republican senator Thom Tillis are in for tough fights in the state in 2020. According to civiqs, 47% of North Carolinians currently approve of Trump's performance as president, compared to 51% who say they disapprove.
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