772 search results for ""voter fraud""

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.

Won’t get pwned again
by Tom Sullivan

Still image from “The Kids Are Alright” (1979).

There are libraries filled with things I don’t know. Let’s get that out of the way. I’m not as smart as I think I am.

Keeping those two things in mind is good practice as a general rule.

Believing themselves too smart to be fooled is one way very smart people get taken in by claims of the paranormal on the part of clever hucksters, as magician/skeptic/debunker James Randi well knows. A Randi colleague, Jamy Ian Swiss, put it this way:

Any magician worth his salt will tell you that the smarter an audience, the more easily fooled they are. That’s a very counterintuitive idea. But it’s why scientists, for example, get in trouble with psychics and such types. Scientists aren’t trained to study something that’s deceptive. Did you ever hear of a sneaky amoeba? I don’t think so.

So, a word of caution for progressives who pride themselves on their education, command of the issues, and their political savvy: vandals are already out there actively trying to mess with you. Best not to fall for it.

There is an emergent effort on the Internet to divide and conquer the left. Again. Early targets are Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), Politico reports:

A POLITICO review of recent data extracted from Twitter and from other platforms, as well as interviews with data scientists and digital campaign strategists, suggests that the goal of the coordinated barrage appears to be undermining the nascent candidacies through the dissemination of memes, hashtags, misinformation and distortions of their positions. But the divisive nature of many of the posts also hints at a broader effort to sow discord and chaos within the Democratic presidential primary.

The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.

Rather than use bots this time, cyber propagandists are identifying real people already pushing anti-left memes. Guardians.ai identified approximately 200 accounts coordinating to spread the mind toxins. The same cluster “was the driving force behind an effort to aggressively advance conspiracy theories in the 2018 midterms, ranging from misinformation about voter fraud to narratives involving a caravan coming to the United States, and even advocacy of violence.”

Be careful what you share. If it’s derogatory about a candidate who is a threat to your preferred candidate, just don’t. There is a fair chance it is propaganda. Don’t traffic in it. Don’t get pwned. You are too smart to act like your crazy, right-wing uncle.

Also, you children don’t put your lips on dirty media narratives. You don’t know where they’ve been.

Democrats need to keep the public focused on their proposed solutions to real people’s problems. Republicans want to play “gotcha.” Paul Waldman snarks, the media would rather ask, “Are Democrats at risk of being labeled socialist socialists with all their socialist socialism?”

Again, many smart progressives’ first instinct is to respond, meaning opponents set the terms of debate. We’re the Hermiones always throwing their hands in the air to offer an answer. We are so eager to show off our smarts we do not notice we are campaigning on our opponents’ terms.

When Kamala Harris says, “I strongly believe that we need Medicare-for-all,” some reporter is going to ask, “Do you think that’s socialist or not?” Waldman observes:

The proper answer is, Who cares? Like any policy idea, it’s either good or bad. The fact that the term “socialism” has become so fluid, with so many people using it to describe different things, makes it even less meaningful to just ask whether an idea is or isn’t socialist.

Devoid of their own ideas, propagandists love a bogeyman. Donald Trump is nothing if not a propagandist. He is backed by a cable network of professional propagandists and an ad hoc assembly of enthusiastic wingmen. A wise man once said, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”

NC-9 absentees: Signed unsealed & undelivered?
by Tom Sullivan

North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District stretches from Charlotte to Fayetteville along the SC border (via Wikipedia)

N.C. State Elections Director Kim Strach opened Monday’s formal hearing into election fraud allegations in the 2018 NC-9 congressional race by announcing investigators had uncovered a “coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” in Bladen and Robeson counties on the eastern end of the district.

It was the first of what could be three days of testimony into the country’s last unresolved 2018 congressional race. To summarize (from a December post):

At the center of it all, a political operative named McCrae Dowless, 62, hired by Republican Mark Harris’s campaign and other candidates to assist voters with absentee ballot requests. Convicted of insurance fraud in 1992, Dowless is now a person of interest in the state’s investigation into an alleged absentee ballot “harvesting” operation.

On Election night, Harris led Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes.

pic.twitter.com/YQ3FnIzc0W— Michael Stolp (@StolpWSOC9) February 18, 2019

At the center of Monday’s hearing was Lisa Britt, one of the crew Dowless paid to both help rural voters request absentee ballots. Britt’s mother was married to Dowless in the early 1990s. Both were living at his home at times during 2018.

Assisting voters in requesting absentee-by-mail ballots is acceptable practice. But Dowless knew through daily public records updates whose absentee ballots had been mailed out. He then sent his team back to the homes to witness and collect them. Anyone other than a close family member collecting completed ballots for return to the Board of Elections is a felony in North Carolina.

Britt testified under oath she had turned over some ballot envelopes to Dowless with no witness signatures. She signed her mother’s name as witness in maybe seven cases because Dowless told her she had already witnessed too many. Many of the witness signatures were not signed not in the presence of the voters. She also admitted to filling in down-ballot races voters had left blank on some ballots they received unsealed. Dowless was employed by Republican Mark Harris; she selected Republican candidates. A later witness admitted she had turned over her blank ballot, signed, but unsealed for the Dowless team to fill in for her.

As we await the start of @ncsbe's NC09 hearing, here's a data viz of the alleged election fraud in action. This video shows the locations and dates of absentee ballots requested but never returned across NC09, breaking out in Robeson & Bladen counties like sore wound. #ncpol pic.twitter.com/NSGJbawLoV— EQV Analytics (@AnalyticsEqv) February 18, 2019

Britt admitted that if she had not realized at first this operation was illegal, she soon did, but continued out of loyalty to Dowless. “Mr. Dowless has been a father figure to me for 30 years,” Britt said. Others witnesses confirmed that many of the ballots collected came from relatives, friends, and neighbors impacted by Hurricane Florence.

Dowless’ ex-wife, Sandra Dowless, testified she was surprised to learn from Strach how much money changed hands since he never seemed to have any money, drawing laughs in the hearing room. Since Britt knew of only a half dozen people on the Dowless collection team, it was unclear Monday where all the money went.

The Dowless team collected “as many as 1,249 ballot request forms overall in the general election,” the Washington Post reports, adding, “It’s unclear exactly how many actual ballots Dowless and his associates turned in.” There was no direct testimony on Monday that any had been destroyed.

Britt testified Dowless asked his team to coordinate signature ink color, stamp alignment, number of ballots mailed at any time to prevent throwing up “red flags” for county Boards of Elections. But the high ratio of requests versus non-returned ballots in the small counties drew attention Dowless had hoped to avoid.

The preview of evidence alone shows state investigators found a lot we haven’t heard yet. pic.twitter.com/MCs9cSVmTy— Michael Stolp (@StolpWSOC9) February 18, 2019

pic.twitter.com/myVu1tNzDZ— Michael Stolp (@StolpWSOC9) February 18, 2019

Britt testified that Dowless called team members to his home in December after the State Board refused to certify election and he coached them to “stick together” and to not admit collecting ballots, as he’d paid them to. Britt admitted she had lied in an interview with WBTV when she denied collecting absentee ballots. A convicted felon herself, Britt was ineligible to vote in 2018.

Strach displayed an image of a slip Dowless had delivered to his team last week coaching them to plead the Fifth Amendment.

Britt says Dowless told her: “They don’t have anything on us.”

And then there’s this text Dowless told Britt to give to her mother and say at this hearing today. #nc09 #ncpol pic.twitter.com/QwQ3yCdl1v— Democracy NC (@democracync) February 18, 2019

Dowless when called refused to testify without a grant of immunity.

Per state law, the Board of Elections may call for a new election if:

(1) Ineligible voters sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election were allowed to vote in the election, and it is not possible from examination of the official ballots to determine how those ineligible voters voted and to
correct the totals.
(2) Eligible voters sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election were improperly prevented from voting.
(3) Other irregularities affected a sufficient number of votes to change the outcome of the election.
(4) Irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness.

After so much G.O.P. legal and rhetorical caterwauling over the need for sweeping voter law changes to fight the scourge of widespread-yet-undetected voter fraud, the party is minimizing the impacts of the Dowless operation paid for by a Republican candidate. Republicans argue Dowless’ regrettable activities were insufficient to change the outcome of the election (3). Democrats argue the entire election is tainted (4) and new election is required. Under this level of state and national media scrutiny, Republicans may have the tougher case to make.

The Washington Post sums up:

Adding to the partisan currents, the state elections board requires a supermajority of four votes to call for a new election. With three Democrats and two Republicans, the board will not have the votes to take any action if its members vote along partisan lines. That would turn attention to Congress, which also has the power to order a new election.

One seat in the hearing room bore the tag, “U.S. House counsel.” It was occupied.

The death of Congressman Walter B. Jones Jr., Republican from NC-3, ten days ago leaves two of North Carolina’s 13 U.S. House seats vacant. The fact Gov. Roy Cooper has not yet announced a special election to fill the Jones seat suggests he is waiting for the outcome of the NC-9 investigation. Running both elections on the same day would make logistical and economic sense.

The hearings continue today (Tuesday) at 9:30 a.m. EST and may be streamed again on WRAL.

Supremely inappropriate

by digby

I mentioned earlier that Mulvaney is in way over his head as Trump’s chief of staff. Yep:

White House aide familiar with Ginni Thomas/Trump meeting depicted in NYT said it was “as wild as it was described.” Person says there are fewer controls to keep meetings like that from happening and that building feels “a lot like early 2017.”

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) January 27, 2019

This is the meeting they are talking about. Karoli at Crooks and Liars wrote it up:

The right-wing influence group “Groundswell” is alive, well, and thriving. Just last week, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas went to the White House and paid Donald J. Trump a visit, specifically to yell at him about transgender people and also to complain that he wasn’t appointing her friends fast enough.
It must be nice to have the ear of a Supreme Court Justice, eh? Just last week the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump’s transgender ban could be upheld while the case moved through the courts. I’m sure Ginni had nothing to do with that.

But it wasn’t just Ginni who marched into the Oval Office with a list of demands. She brought her posse with her, to demand that Trump immediately bend the knee to her demands, according to The New York Times.

Louie Gohmert’s Chief of Staff was one of the friends Ginni brought along, though she claimed Connie Hair was just a conservative columnist, nothing to see there at all. Nope, not a thing.

A central focus for Ms. Hair and Ms. Thomas was administration appointments that they wanted made, and that they accused the president’s aides of blocking. People familiar with the situation indicated that the people Ms. Hair and Ms. Thomas wanted hired were rejected for a range of reasons, and in at least one case, someone was offered a job and declined it because the position was not considered senior enough. Another complaint was that Ms. Thomas had not actually shared the full list of people to be hired, said those familiar with the meeting.

Others attending the meeting included Frank Gaffney, the founder of the Center for Security Policy who has advocated curtailing immigration and has repeatedly denounced Muslims, and Rosemary Jenks, who works for the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA, according to the people familiar with the events.

If you’ve never heard of Groundswell, click this link.

The meeting came about because Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife had been over to the White House for a private dinner with the president.

That’s right. A Supreme Court justice, who is married to an important right-wing activist, was at a private dinner at the White House which led to another private meeting with a bunch of wingnut lunatics to complain that the Donald Trump wasn’t being looney enough. While the government was shut down.

Here’s the gist of the NY Times story, which I have to admit made me laugh. Here’s Trump in the middle of the shutdown, having demeaned himself to please the base on immigration being berated by a bunch of right wing extremists for failing them. Sometimes life is good:

For 60 minutes Mr. Trump sat, saying little but appearing taken aback, the three people said, as the group also accused White House aides of blocking Trump supporters from getting jobs in the administration.

It is unusual for the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice to have such a meeting with a president, and some close to Mr. Trump said it was inappropriate for Ms. Thomas to have asked to meet with the head of a different branch of government.

A vocal conservative, Ms. Thomas has long been close to what had been the Republican Party’s fringes, and extremely outspoken against Democrats. Her activism has raised concerns of conflicts of interest for her husband, who is perhaps the most conservative member of the Supreme Court.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the meeting, and Ms. Thomas did not respond to an email seeking comment.

During the meeting last Thursday in the Roosevelt Room, which was attended by about a half-dozen White House aides, one woman argued that women should not serve in the military because they had less muscle mass and lung capacity than men did, according to those familiar with the events. At another point, someone said that gay marriage, which the Supreme Court determined in 2015 was the law of the land, was harming the fabric of the United States. And another attendee was dismissive that sexual assault is pervasive in the military.

The meeting was arranged after months of delay, according to the three people. It came about after the Thomases had dinner with the president and the first lady, Melania Trump, the people said.

Ms. Thomas was an ardent supporter of Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, during the 2016 presidential primaries. But she shifted her support to Mr. Trump when he became the nominee and has forcefully denounced his political critics. [They didn’t mention that to trump and she portrayed herself as a big Trump supporter. lol.]
[…]
Ms. Thomas — whose group, Groundswell, was formed in 2013 to strategize against Democrats and the political left and meets weekly — joined others in prayer at the start of the meeting. Some members of the group prayed at different moments as the meeting continued. At one point, Mr. Trump pulled in his daughter Ivanka, a West Wing adviser, saying she would be beloved if she were serving a liberal president, instead of getting negative news coverage.

One attendee criticized Republican congressional leaders, saying they should be “tarred and feathered,” a person briefed on the meeting said. Mr. Trump defended the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, saying that they had held strong for nearly five weeks of a shutdown, and that it was not clear what else the attendees thought they could be doing.

Hahahahaha! Welcome to our world Trumpie!

Ms. Thomas, who was said to have opened the meeting by informing the assembled White House staff members that she feared being open because she did not trust the people there, has long been more conservative than her husband, and has often provoked controversy.

In 2011 she formed a government affairs firm called Liberty Consulting, which drew criticism for boasting on its website that Ms. Thomas would use her “experience and connections” to help clients.

More recently, she hired as an assistant a woman fired by the conservative group Turning Point USA for texting a colleague a year earlier that “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.” The woman, Crystal Clanton, was on the list of people Ms. Thomas’s group asked to have attend the meeting, the people familiar with the sit-down said.

She has also drawn criticism for sharing social media posts promoting conspiracy theories, including one suggesting that the billionaire philanthropist George Soros was working against Mr. Trump and that Democrats had committed voter fraud during last year’s midterm elections. Shortly before the elections, Ms. Thomas also shared a misleading post about the caravan of migrants traveling toward the United States.

She’s as nutty as they come.

I don’t think I need to mention that the Republicans would impeach any liberal Justice whose spouse worked as a far-left activist of this type. It’s simply bizarre that this is ok. It’s not that a spouse doesn’t have the right to have his or her own job. But this kind of political activism should be off limits.

But hey — they do what they want. Rules are for losers.

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Remember. They cheat.

by digby

I can see a certain complacency overtaking many Democrats going into 20/20, both on the apparent assumption that impeachment is a bad option because it would be “better” to win at the ballot baox, and among partisans  who believe that it doesn’t matter who runs against Trump because we are assured of winning. Both cases assume that the Dems are a shoo-in.

No one can be faulted for believing they should be. The man’s presidency is an unprecedented dumpster fire as anyone could have predicted the minute he rode down on the golden escalator in 2015.  But Trump and his party should not be underestimated no matter how unpopular they are in the polls. They have shown for decades that they will win by any means necessary.

Here’s the latest news by Rick Hasen that should make you double your efforts to get out the vote in 2020. Democrats have to win by a very large percentage to overcome this handicap:

In a short unpublished opinion so far garnering only slight media attention, the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit decided on Monday what may be one of the most consequential cases poised to affect the 2020 elections. The circuit upheld a district court decision ending a court order in effect since 1982 barring the Republican National Committee from engaging in “ballot security” measures designed to intimidate minority voters from voting at the polls. With Trump having taken over the RNC for the 2020 elections and with this consent decree no longer standing in his way, we should be concerned about a new wave of voter suppression coming from the Republican Party during the upcoming election.

At rallies, Trump made statements such as: “[G]o around and watch other polling places,” … “[It’s] so important that you watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” … and “You’ve got to get everybody to go out and watch. … And when I say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about. Right?” … The Trump campaign website contained a form allowing supporters to register as “Trump Election Observers.”

But it said that the district court could reasonably have concluded Trump and his 2016 campaign did this in isolation from the RNC, the only one bound by the decree.

We can only guess what Trump and the RNC, now freed from this consent decree, will have planned for 2020. Trump has irresponsibly used allegations of voter fraud and stolen elections to delegitimize his opposition and rile up his base. During the 2018 election, he made unfounded allegations that Democrats were trying to steal the U.S. Senate seat in Florida from Rick Scott during state-required recounts of ballots in the close election.

He breaks down the issues of the case in detail and it’s quite interesting. It goes back to 1981 — when the Republicans were caught cheating of course. I recommend reading it just to remind yourself of how long they’ve been doing this stuff. He concludes with this from the court opinion:

It noted that:

At rallies, Trump made statements such as: “[G]o around and watch other polling places,” … “[It’s] so important that you watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” … and “You’ve got to get everybody to go out and watch. … And when I say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about. Right?” … The Trump campaign website contained a form allowing supporters to register as “Trump Election Observers.”

But it said that the district court could reasonably have concluded Trump and his 2016 campaign did this in isolation from the RNC, the only one bound by the decree.

We can only guess what Trump and the RNC, now freed from this consent decree, will have planned for 2020. Trump has irresponsibly used allegations of voter fraud and stolen elections to delegitimize his opposition and rile up his base. During the 2018 election, he made unfounded allegations that Democrats were trying to steal the U.S. Senate seat in Florida from Rick Scott during state-required recounts of ballots in the close election.

Had Trump not taken over the RNC, I would not be so concerned about the demise of the decree. Thirty-five years is a long time, and many of the Republican lawyers I know would bristle at some of the tactics that the RNC had used in the past. But Trump likely has different plans in mind, and it would not surprise me to see Democrats and voting rights activists running back to court in 2020, trying to stop the renewal of odious tactics that should have by now been consigned to the history books.

The TNC will have no limits. After all, it certainly appears he was more than willing to conspire with a foreign country to sabotage the election. He said on the stump the last time that he would only accept the results of the election if he won. They will use whatever levers they have available to win. Don’t underestimate them. They’ve been doing this for decades. Trump is just more crudely open about it.

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NC-9’s hot mess
by Tom Sullivan

North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District stretches from Charlotte to Fayetteville along the SC border (via Wikipedia)

The chaos in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District race may seem small potatoes compared to the maelstrom in Washington. But as of Friday noon, the state elections board dissolved with its investigation into election fraud allegations incomplete and the race uncertified, effectively leaving the district “home alone.” Complicating resolving whether there will be a new election in NC-9 is the ongoing dispute over the makeup of the State Board of Elections between Democratic Governor Roy Cooper and a Republican-controlled legislature set to lose its veto-proof majority next week.

In another of those now-infamous Republican lame-duck sessions, the legislature in the wake of Gov. Pat McCrory’s 2016 reelection loss re-structured the Board to dilute the incoming Democrat’s powers. That matter has been in courts since Cooper took office. Nevertheless, the Board of Elections will decide whether or not to hold a new election. But the existing board, already granted an extension beyond its post-election expiration date, dissolved on December 28. A three-judge panel overseeing the board lawsuit ruled Thursday it would not extend the existing panel yet again:

In issuing its ruling, the panel made reference to the fact that the NCSBE scheduled its hearing into the 9th Congressional District on January 11, 2019, instead of by its original self-imposed deadline of December 21, 2018.

“The parties have not given even a cursory explanation as to why the hearing was continued from December 28, 2018 until January 11, 2019, let alone one demonstrating compelling reasons and substantial and reasonable justification, for not only the additional time needed, but the total disregard of the previous Order of the Court in extending the stay,” the order reads.

The Board might already have resolved prior to the new congressional session whether voters in NC-9 would have a representative seated or face a new election, the judges scolded, but it failed to act with appropriate urgency.

I have been putting off writing about this all week, gathering links along the way. Thankfully, Michael Bitzer gave a synopsis in a series of tweets on Thursday. Scroll through it if you have a notion, but Dramamine might come in handy. Bitzer explores the prehistory of the State Board of Elections dispute in a blog post concluding with this:

So, as of Friday, December 28, at noon, the 9-member State Board of Elections ceased operations, with Governor Cooper announcing that he would appoint a temporary Board of Elections to continue the operations and investigation for the Ninth Congressional District, while a leading NC State House Republican calling that the governor has “no authority” for such an interim board action.

All that drama is tangential to but also key to resolving the election fraud investigation in NC-9 and settling the last congressional election of 2018.

As things stand (if I haven’t missed anything), the State Board of Elections refused to certify the results of the NC-9 election after seeing abnormalities in absentee ballot quantities, vote totals, and non-returns in Bladen County. Then in Robeson County. Finally, Columbus County in the adjacent 7th District, seemed to be involved in absentee ballot fraud. At the center of it all, a political operative named McCrae Dowless, 62, hired by Republican Mark Harris’s campaign and other candidates to assist voters with absentee ballot requests. Convicted of insurance fraud in 1992, Dowless is now a person of interest in the state’s investigation into an alleged absentee ballot “harvesting” operation.

On Election night, Harris led Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes.

NC Policy Watch summarizes what raised eyebrows:

In the GOP primary, Harris won 96 percent of Bladen County’s mail-in ballots – an extraordinary showing against the Republican incumbent.

In the general election Harris took 61 percent of the county’s mail-in absentee vote in a race where only 19 percent of the mail-in ballots came from registered Republicans.

In order for that to happen, Harris would have to have gotten all of the mail-in absentee votes of the 19 percent of registered Republicans, nearly all of the unaffiliated voters who used that method and some of the Democrats who voted that way as well.

Reports suggest Dowless’s team illegally gathered absentee ballots from voters door-to-door. Then Dowless either disposed of those from Democratic voters or filled in the ballots for them if incomplete and unsealed, and selectively returned ballots from registered Republicans for the Harris race and sheriffs’ contests that hired him.

Only a direct family member may legally turn in someone else’s absentee ballot in North Carolina. An attorney representing Dowless claims he has violated no laws, state or federal.

Incoming U.S. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) has confirmed the House will not seat Harris next week.

Sworn affidavits filed as part of the election fraud investigation reveal the tactics were part of Dowless’s “new trick” for winning, one he mentioned to Bladen County Board of Elections board members, claims Ben Snyder, Chairman of the Bladen County Democratic Party. Dowless told them he was throwing ballots in the trash.

Several voters reported receiving absentee ballots they did not request. Jens Lutz, a former member of the Bladen County Board of Elections who had operated a political consulting firm with Dowless, affirmed:

It is my understanding that during prior election years, Board staff allowed Mr. Dowless to take and copy unredacted absentee ballot request forms, which include social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, state ID numbers, and signatures. Upon information and belief, this information gave Mr. Dowless the ability to request absentee ballots for anyone who has ever voted by absentee ballot by mail in the recent past.

[…]

It is my understanding that Open Records Laws allow citizens to receive information from County Boards of Election regarding when absentee ballots would be sent to specific voters. Mr. Dowless abused this provision in the law by regularly receiving such information (contained in a report titled “Absentee Ballot Voter Correspondence Report”) from Board staff, allowing Mr. Dowless to send his workers to those voters right after the ballots arrived.

Yes, of course, there is more:

In his affidavit, Lutz describes the Bladen elections board’s security as “lax” and claims there were “multiple instances” in which the actual absentee ballot totals didn’t match what the staff reported.

The allegations of lax security are similar to those of Agnes Willis, a Bladen County precinct worker who wrote in a Nov. 29 affidavit that early-voting election results were “viewed by officials at the one-stop site who were not judges.”

This had the potential for advantaging Harris’s Election Day get-out-the-vote targeting. Lutz explained:

I know of one person who claims to have overheard Mr. Dowless bragging about preelection candidate vote totals to multiple people after one-stop in-person, early voting ended, indicating that he was aware of the one-stop early voting totals, and that the candidate or candidates he supported were in the lead.

The State Board of Elections alerted state and federal prosecutors of irregularities in Bladen County in 2016. Nothing happened.

Allison Riggs, a senior attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, told NC Policy Watch, “Since 2016 they have had information about criminal activity affecting thousands of votes and instead the U.S. Attorney’s office has concentrated on 19 non-citizens who made a mistake in voting and gotten one plea where he said, ‘I made a mistake. I thought I was good to go.’”

So here we are. Gov. Roy Cooper announced Thursday night that under his executive authority he would appoint an interim board to carry on the inquiry until the new permanent board takes over on January 31, 2019.

NCGOP Chair Robin Hayes called Cooper’s plan an “illegal sham.” MSNBC’s Joy Reid last night called the situation in North Carolina a hot mess. The Daily Haymaker, a T-party blog published from the golf communities surrounding Pinehurst, NC, hopes state Republicans will nominate Jay DeLancy to the reconstituted Board of Elections. DeLancy runs the North Carolina Voter Integrity Project (VIP-NC) dedicated to promoting photo IDs and exposing voter fraud.

The U.S. House of Representatives has the ultimate say on whom it admits to its ranks. The voters of North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District may not have a representative in Congress until late spring or early summer.

If you value what we write here, I hope you’ll consider supporting the blog with a couple of bucks. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

Buckle up everybody. It’s going to be a very bumpy New Year …


cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

… and this is now
by Tom Sullivan

After a Buncombe County, NC election recount in 2012, a colleague observed T-party members are convinced if they lose an election it must be because their opponents cheated. It’s almost Freudian.

On Wednesday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections confirmed it has issued subpoenas in the largest election fraud investigation in recent memory. Evidence surfaced in the NC-9 race that a team paid by Republican candidate and pastor, Mark Harris, had been illegally collecting absentee ballots from voters. Some of those ballots may have been destroyed. Harris’s campaign, Red Dome Group, and Bladen County Sheriff Jim McVicker’s campaign are a focus of state investigators.

The Board has refused to certify the results, pending a formal hearing on “claims of numerous irregularities” and “concerted fraudulent activities related to absentee mail ballots.” Harris led Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes until Bladen County residents provided affidavits stating workers came to their doors and collected incomplete and unsealed absentee ballots.

The Board has the power to call a new election. The hearing must take place by Dec. 21.

BuzzFeed News examines the inner workings of the absentee ballot harvesting operation allegedly run by McCrae Dowless. The team tracked ballots by party and race and signed multiple ballots as witnesses:

Jessica Dowless described the scene in the small office at the intersection of two highways, where she worked on Harris’s behalf for the last two months as chaotic. One worker, she said, “was so fucking high the other day she passed out at the fucking computer.” One of the workers who collected absentee ballots from residents was a “pill head,” she said.

Dowless, whose husband is distantly related to McCrae Dowless, described herself as a “housewife [who] needed a part-time job” and said she was one of about six employees. She often worked six days a week tallying the number of Democrats and Republicans who had recently voted. However, she explained, there were times when she did not quite understand what she was doing or what the grand purpose was.

She did say, though, that campaign workers delivered sealed absentee ballots from the homes of people who requested them to McCrae Dowless’s office — though North Carolina law forbids third parties from handling those ballots.

McCrae had “wads and wads of cash,” for paying workers and even bought one woman a car to use after a week in the office, Jessica Dowless told BuzzFeed. Public records show the Bladen County Republican Executive Committee paid Jessica Dowless $240 and McCrae Dowless $940. WSOC-TV Charlotte reports the Harris campaign paid Red Dome more than $428,000. The North Carolina political consultant group in turn hired Dowless.

Dallas Woodhouse, executive chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, spoke gravely of the issue of election fraud in 2016 during recounts of a close race between Republican incumbent governor Pat McCrory and Democrat Roy Cooper:

“Should the election board find that these are absentee ballot mills, with the purpose of fraudulent voting, those people should go to jail,” he told the radio show [This American Life]. “They should spend the first term of the Trump administration behind bars.”

Now Woodhouse sings a different tune and accuses Democrats of trying to steal the NC-9 election. From the Washington Post:

“We think they have abused their discretion and violated the statute,” Woodhouse said of the bipartisan election board on Nov. 27, the day it declined to certify Harris as the victor. “This will inevitably end up in court. The fact of the matter is Mark Harris won the race. He got more votes.”

On Twitter, he pointed to a culprit: “The democrats decided not to certify the results,” he wrote, “and everyone know[s] it.”

It is a familiar play from an old playbook, “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.” Roger Stone’s playbook.

North Carolina is the pointed end of Republican efforts nationally to restrict access to voting to quell a supposed epidemic of voter fraud for which there is no evidence.

Nationally, the specter of voter fraud has also become a fixation for Republicans. But many of the prominent party officials who have complained about supposed voting issues, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach have remained silent about the investigation in North Carolina. President Trump, who has made unsupported conspiracy theories and unfounded claims about fraudulent votes a hallmark of his presidency, also has said nothing about the issue in the state.

You really should read the whole BuzzFeed story.

NC 9th’s Aunt Bee pickle
by Tom Sullivan

The strange tale of election-rigging in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District gets stranger. Courtesy of Judd Legum’s
newsletter, “Popular Information,” the state Board’s decision to put on hold certification of the race in which Republican Mark Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes just got stranger:

The decision comes after substantial evidence of improprieties involving absentee ballots. A series of affidavits submitted suggests that a man named Leslie McCrae Dowless, who was hired by the Harris campaign through a contractor, systematically falsified, manipulated, and potentially destroyed absentee ballots — particularly in Bladen County. Harris won Bladen County by 1,557 votes, more than his margin statewide. [districtwide, TS]

In fact, requests for absentee ballots in Bladen ran at 7.5 percent, while elsewhere in the district it was under 3 percent. Furthermore, the high percentage of the requests that went unreturned in Bladen and Robeson Counties — as many as 3,400 — suggests ballots collected by contractors working with Dowless were falsified or destroyed. Of voters in Bladen requesting absentee ballots, 19 percent were Republicans, yet Harris received 61 percent of the absentee vote.

Affidavit from Bladen County absentee voter suggests something a little strange. #ncpol #nc9 #ncga pic.twitter.com/DrLuLhp5oa— Jim Morrill (@jimmorrill) November 29, 2018

Here's another affidavit from a Bladen absentee voter. One reason why state officials apparently looking into such cases. #ncpol #nc9 #ncga pic.twitter.com/qC1EpVLsXp— Jim Morrill (@jimmorrill) November 29, 2018

Helping people request absentee ballots is permissible. Collecting absentee ballots is illegal and known as harvesting.

Another person filed an affidavit saying McCrae Dowless said he was hired by Harris to work the absentee ballot operation in Bladen County. If Harris won, McCrae Dowless said he would be paid $40,000 in cash.

As the problems in North Carolina’s 9th District have garnered national attention, one important aspect of the story has gone unreported: McCrae Dowless’ criminal record. Records from the North Carolina Department Of Public Safety obtained by Popular Information reveal McCrae Dowless has been convicted of multiple crimes.

Kiting checks, insurance fraud, parole violation, etc. … just the sort you want running an absentee ballot program.

Vox’s Dylan Scott adds:

This isn’t the first time Dowless’s name has come up in relation to voting shenanigans: In 2016, several people filed complaints about campaign workers hired by Dowless who were collecting absentee ballots, as WECT reported at the time. (Confusing matters even further: Dowless was, at the time, alleging voter fraud undertaken by Democrats. There’s a lot going on here.)

Dowless was paid as a contractor by the Harris campaign in 2018, the Charlotte Observer reported. He denies any wrongdoing.

Michael Bitzer of Old North State Politics provides a handy chart to display how Bladen’s and Robeson’s absentee non-return rates diverge from the rest of the district:

The key takeaway is if the state Board decides to call for a new election, it may if there is evidence the election was conducted unfairly, even if the amount of fraud might not have been substantial enough to alter the outcome.

“By my statutory reading and interpretation, it doesn’t matter whether there are enough votes that may or may not necessarily change the outcome,” Bitzer told Vox.

That outcome is, as they might say in Mayberry, an Aunt Bee pickle, and may well land parties back in court again. Republicans have spent quite a lot of time there since taking full control of state government in 2013.

They will be back there again anyway. Voters approved a “blank check” voter ID constitutional amendment in November, the blanks to be filled in by Republican legislators during the current lame-duck session. That work is in progress. As soon as Republicans override Gov. Roy Cooper’s expected veto, they will be back in court defending it. One estimate puts the costs of that defense at $12 million. (The state spent nearly $5 million defending its last voter ID law, and losing.) For reference, their 2012 Amendment One prohibiting same-sex marriage did not survive court scrutiny after passage.

“This tells me that the election system is broken, even ore [sic] reason voter ID is needed,” one commenter wrote on the state Democratic Party chair’s Facebook page.

That, despite presenting IDs having no role in absentee ballot fraud or this kind of suspected election-rigging. But like tax cuts being their economic cure-all, whatever the election malfeasance, voter ID is the Republican answer. Even though impersonation fraud, the only kind voter ID might reliably catch at the polls, is all but an imaginary problem.

Don’t believe me? How about the Heritage Foundation’s accounting from a period covering about 2 billion general election votes? I took a look through it the other day.

Democracy: for better and for worse
by Tom Sullivan

Rick Hasen had a particularly blue Monday: “I believe I’ve never been called a Nazi before today.” Twitter users piled on over a Slate headline Hasen did not write atop an article many did not read. So it goes with social media.

Hasen argues against Democrats calling the Georgia governor’s race “stolen” (Sen. Sherrod Brown) or “illegitimate” (Stacey Abrams) for three reasons. One, “rhetoric about stolen elections feeds a growing cycle of mistrust and delegitimization of the election process.” Two, former Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s blatant efforts to suppress the vote in Georgia, while odious, have not been proven illegal. Hasen believes, “making charges of a stolen election when it cannot be proved undermines Democrats’ complaints about suppressive tactics.” And three, “stolen election” rhetoric diverts attention from how erecting bogus obstacles to voting violates the “dignity and respect” due each voter and onto election outcomes instead.

One reader counters that a fine distinction between voter suppression and stolen elections does not exist for the disenfranchised. Fair point, Hasen replied, “I guess that I’m desperately worried about both voter suppression and about delegitimization of our electoral system and democratic processes.”

On points one and two, calling the election stolen is inflammatory in the same way for Democrats as it is for GOP voters. But concern for their credibility has never stopped GOP operatives from making unproven allegations of widespread voter fraud that led us to this point.*

An argument Hasen doesn’t quite make is that after so many months of inflammatory and baldfaced Trumpish lies, Democrats trading in similar talk, even if justified, reduces the argument over voting rights to he-said/she-said. So it will be portrayed in the press: overheated rhetoric.

Concern about delegitimization of the election process is valid, of course. But that horse has left the barn. The GOP spent decades purposefully undermining the public’s confidence in elections. Kris Kobach, Hans von Spakovsky, Brian Kemp and other GOP hucksters spun the legend of voter fraud to create public demand for voter ID and other vote-suppressing regulations that would tilt game the system in their favor. They personalized their pitch, arguing that a single illegitimate ballot “steals your vote.” Promoting “election integrity,” they mug, is oh, so vital for rebuilding public trust they themselves worked so assiduously to undermine to their benefit.

That they have done so through “bureaucratic legerdemain and malfeasance in office” is beside the point, argues Charlie Pierce: “Is there an exemption by which theft is not theft if it is done under the color of law?”

In similar fashion, red-leaning states starve efforts to replace aging and vulnerable voting equipment as well as improvements to the process Hasen wants to see. When machines break down, when clerks turn away purged voters, when standing in line to vote takes hours, those too undermine voter confidence in democratic government. Just as planned. Hasen’s point about calling it theft is well-taken, but the experience of having your voice stolen by a sabotaged process is far more potent than the rhetoric.

Rachel Maddow last night provided graphics to illustrate how rigged the system is, albeit legally.

In state after state, Republicans have tilted the playing field, perverting democracy to their advantage. pic.twitter.com/xmF6vFfhrn— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) November 20, 2018

On Hasen’s third point, attention does indeed need to remain fixed on how rigging the election process degrades the dignity and respect of voters who out of respect for and in service to our hard-fought democracy stand for hours to have their voices heard, only to have doors slammed in their faces by patriotic poseurs.

But nobody is fooled by flag-hugging that what is left of the Republican Party has any scruples left to shed. Nor has the party faith in any form of democracy that does not guarantee its rule. The sitting president is not the source of that royalist sentiment, but a product of it. The GOP has spent decades and innumerable dollars undermining the public’s confidence in elections to lock in its power. In the process of repairing what is broken, will bluntly pointing that out make it worse?

* I just re-reviewed the Heritage Foundation’s updated bundle of 1,088 “voter fraud” cases used to bolster the case for voting restrictions. To pad out their count, the archive includes cases going back to 1948. Any and all varieties of election rigging, registration fraud, vote-buying, even ballot petition fraud are lumped together under the rubric of voter fraud (which they use interchangeably with election fraud). Counts are approximate because some crimes overlap. A sampling:

Impersonation Fraud at the Polls: 13. A couple of those involve election judges and one by a man wanting to demonstrate how easy it is to impersonate someone at the polls.

Duplicate voting: 54. Many of the duplicate voting cases involve 2-state voting; 7 cases were attempted & thwarted by election judges.

Ineligible Voting: 201. Most of the ineligible voting cases involve felons and non-citizens improperly registered, many already possessing IDs.

Altering the Vote Count: 5. One dates from 1948.

Ballot Petition Fraud: 72

Charlie Pierce FTW

Chuck Todd was appropriately dismayed. But Senator Brown wasn’t playing that, either.

TODD: I guess I would ask this. Couldn’t you bring up all of those, all of those issues, lay all of that out, without using the word, stolen? And I throw that out there, because we have enough distrust in our institutions as it is…Does that add to it?

BROWN: Okay, Chuck. Don’t do the false equivalency of, of, of, the, you know, the lack of respect in institutions. I mean, we have a president that attacks your profession day after day after day. You, if you saw the earlier part of my election-night speech, you would’ve heard me thank the media. And you would’ve seen hundreds of people in Ohio, on the Democratic — at this election-night gathering, turn around and clap for the media. We see a president that goes after the courts, that goes after the judicial system, a president that says, as the votes were counted, that something’s been wrong with the elections. He criticizes the elections that way. So don’t play this false equivalency. Because a former secretary of state, like me, said that about this election, which clearly is an effort to suppress the vote, not of people that look like you and me, Chuck–

CHUCK TODD: Right.

BROWN: –but people of color especially. And it’s happened. Now spend your air time– I don’t mean to lecture–

TODD: No, no, no, I, look —

BROWN: — but spend your airtime critical of those people who are trying to suppress the vote.

This is not to single out Chuck Todd. His interplay with Brown was merely the most obvious public manifestation of dismay over the senator’s quite accurate assessment of what happened in Georgia. More than a few pearls were clutched over Brown’s choice of language.

Rick Hasen, the election-law guru, writing in Slate, made the same argument at greater length. I confess I don’t follow Hasen’s line of thought at all. He seems to be arguing that calling the election in Georgia “stolen,” as Brown clearly did, undermines the fight against suppressing the vote, as Kemp clearly did.

I’m unclear how this is the case.

First, rhetoric about stolen elections feeds a growing cycle of mistrust and delegitimization of the election process, an attack pushed by President Donald Trump and other Republicans who have been yelling “voter fraud” every time they are behind in the count. I’ve already set out my fear that Trump could refuse to concede the 2020 presidential election if he is ahead in the count on election night and then ballot counts inevitably shift toward Democrats as the counting continues. A democratic polity depends on losers accepting election results, even if the election was not conducted perfectly. I would hold “stolen” election rhetoric for conduct even more outrageous than Kemp’s decisions, which, while odious, either have not been found to be illegal or that courts allowed to remain in place for this election.

I mean, holy hell. Because Kemp used the power of the office he held to help himself gain the office to which he was aspiring, this means that he could not be said to have “stolen” the election, even as a shorthand designation for his clearly corrupt conduct? If a state legislature in, say, Nebraska, were to use its eminent domain power to appropriate a farmer’s land in order to help a foreign corporation build, say, an oil-sands pipeline, is it really not permissible for people to say that the legislature “stole” the farmer’s land, even though it used its power corruptly to benefit a private interest? Is there an exemption by which theft is not theft if it is done under the color of law? A lot of local sheriffs who got rich behind civil forfeiture laws are going to be happy to hear that.

And as for the growing cycle of distrust and delegitimization, that’s already been underway for some time, as Rick Hasen’s previous work has demonstrated. In our current historical moment, it began with the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. Do the people making the tone-police argument on this issue really believe that the Georgia voters who showed up at their polling place only to find that it had been closed, and who then went out of their way to the nearest one only to find that they couldn’t vote because the hyphen in their last name really was a dash, wouldn’t say their votes were “stolen,” and that, therefore, the election was, too? They don’t need Sherrod Brown to believe that, I assure you.

Hasen also seems to misunderstand the nature of El Caudillo Del Mar-A-Lago, too. If the Democratic Party tries to temper its rhetoric based on whatever the most recent egregious lie has emerged from the presidential* gob, the Democratic Party is going to have a nervous breakdown. The president, because he is both corrupt and something of a dunce, will say what he’s going to say regardless of how temperate the Democratic response is. Sometimes, blunt instruments have to be met with blunt instruments.

Much of the most loyal portions of the Democratic Party’s political base already believe from their own experience, and not because of anything Sherrod Brown and Stacey Abrams have said, that their elections are being stolen out from under them. It’s up to the opposition to speak for those whose right to choose their own leaders was, yes, stolen from them through bureaucratic legerdemain and malfeasance in office. Which is a long way around to point out that the run-off election for Secretary of State in Georgia is the most important election of many lifetimes.

Furthermore, we are in a time in which the very concept of the truth is at issue. It’s vitally important that everyone who cares about that just keep it simple and stick with the facts and the truth. If they steal an election, use the clear words to describe it, don’t hedge, don’t be “nuanced.” At this moment we need all the clarity we can get.

.