Do-over!
by Tom Sullivan
Image via WECT Communities/Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0.
The NC State Board of Elections voted unanimously late Thursday afternoon to hold a new election in its 9th Congressional District. The vote ended a months-long inquiry into election fraud in the eastern end of the district in 2018.
The decision came at the end of four days of dramatic testimony that exposed what Kim Strach, the board’s executive director, described as “a coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” in Bladen and Robeson counties.
1. What happened yesterday in North Carolina was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen in politics.
For months, Mark Harris claimed he was SHOCKED to learn a campaign operative was running an election fraud scheme
Then his son testified https://t.co/Dkof34zqZo— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 21, 2019
Dr. Mark Harris, the Republican candidate and Charlotte evangelical minister, spent much of the morning on the witness stand doing damage control after his son John’s devastating testimony on Wednesday.
The younger Harris, a U.S. attorney in the civil division in Raleigh, testified he had warned his father about hiring McCrae Dowless to run an absentee ballot program during the 2018 congressional race. Emails previously not produced as evidence supported his account. Whatever Dowless’ assurances to the elder Harris about the legality of his program, John Harris was convinced by his analysis of past race returns that Dowless was running an illegal ballot harvesting operation. It was a Perry Mason moment.
The elder Harris ignored his son’s warnings. In questioning, Harris said four times he had not told anyone he did not expect the John Harris emails to be made public.
The Washington Post reports that after a lunch break Thursday that ran long, Harris had an announcement:
When the board reconvened, Harris took the stand again and explained that he had been mistaken about that recollection — and had in fact told his younger son, Matthew, in the phone conversation Tuesday evening, that he did not expect those emails to surface the next day.
Harris said the episode made him realize that he was not prepared for the “rigors” of the evidentiary hearing. He called for a new election, then promptly excused himself from the proceeding and walked out.
The State Board had heard plenty to convince them election fraud had occurred. There was no way under the national klieg lights the board of three Democrats and two Republicans could certify the election without adding humiliation to embarrassment. If they deadlocked, the U.S. House had the power to insist on a new election anyway. A unanimous vote was the only face-saving move and the right thing for voters. They voted 5-0 to call a new election and that was that.
As board chairman Bob Cordle noted, North Carolina now has two vacant seats in Congress in districts 3 and 9. The State Board with directions from staff has the responsibility for setting the dates for the do-over in NC-9. Gov. Roy Cooper will call a special election in NC-3 to fill the seat vacated by the recent death of Walter Jones. Presumably, the elections for the two races will occur on the same day. There will be significant review and increased oversight of procedures at the Bladen County Board of Elections.
Voter fraud vigilantes from Kris Kobach to Hans von Spakovsky have fallen silent. Donald Trump declared (after winning) in 2016 that the only reason he had lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes was because millions voted illegally, “Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”
Philip Bump writes:
There was no evidence that this happens. In fact, there’s no evidence that in-person voter fraud happens at any significant scale. But there’s recurring political benefit in claiming that this happens. For Trump, it allows him to soften the blows of political losses, as with the midterms and as with his loss of the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, after which he falsely claimed that millions of votes had been cast illegally. (Trump’s effort to prove the existence of such fraud by forming a commission early in his presidency soon collapsed.) For Republicans more broadly, claims of rampant in-person voter fraud have allowed them to advocate voter ID laws that have the happy side effect of tamping down turnout from communities that tend to vote for Democrats.
Yet here, where the alleged fraud involved absentee ballots (which an expert told me in 2014 was a potential threat to the integrity of elections), there has been almost no outcry from Republican elected officials. Trump hasn’t mentioned the situation in North Carolina. A review of congressional tweets shows no Republican officials who have linked the events in the 9th District to their party’s campaign against voter fraud — and plenty of Democrats who have noted that silence.
From voter ID to citizenship requirements to increased documentation to restricting voting machines and polling stations in minority neighborhoods, the GOP has devoted decades of effort toward shrinking the Democratic electorate — to borrow from Grover Norquist — down to the size it could “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Matthew Dunlap, Maine’s secretary of state and a member of the president’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, served with Kobach and von Spakovsky on the defunct panel. Their silence now reveals their “fundamental bad faith and hucksterism,” Dunlap writes:
We never, ever need to listen to the voter fraud charlatans again. They created a vivid voter fraud fantasy, conjuring up busloads of illegal immigrants or college students stealing seats from upright, patriotic Republicans and delivering them to undeserving Democrats across the nation. The truth is, the myth of voter fraud is nothing more than a ploy to justify laws that make it significantly harder for racial minorities and the poor, constituencies that often lean toward Democrats, to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
The only democracy the fraudsters support is one in which they control the outcome.