Paul Ryan was whining Thursday about how the Republicans had only lost 26 seats when he went to bed on election night and wha wha now they’re down 40. So something’s wrong. Yeah, it’s called counting all the votes and conservatives hate the very concept. Well, there may be 41 soon. Seems there’s a little problem along the southern tier of North Carolina-- the 9th district-- where, ostensibly, it looked like far right extremist Mark Harris defeated Blue Dog Dan McCready by 905 votes. Or maybe not. Tuesday the state board of election unanimously refused to certify the results. And late last night Amy Gardner and Kirk Ros reported for the Washington Post that state election officials had no plans to certify them at their meeting today either. In fact, they wrote, “mounting evidence of voter fraud… could indefinitely delay the certification of a winner, as state election officials investigate whether hundreds of absentee ballots were illegally cast or destroyed. The board is collecting sworn statements from voters in rural Bladen and Robeson counties, near the South Carolina border, who described people coming to their doors and urging them to hand over their absentee ballots, sometimes without filling them out. Others described receiving absentee ballots by mail that they had not requested. It is illegal to take someone else’s ballot and turn it in.”The Charlotte Observer’s editorial board seems stunned and embarrassed— and demanding to know what happened.
We know that board members twice voted 9-0 not to certify the 9th District results. That means the board, which consists of Democrats and Republicans, was overwhelmingly persuaded of the seriousness of [Robeson County Democrat Joshua] Malcolm’s concerns.We know that Elections board spokesman Patrick Gannon told the Associated Press Wednesday that the board is investigating “irregularities” involving absentee ballots in Bladen County, which Harris won by 1,557 votes. We also know that Bladen has what can charitably be described as a colorful political history of alleged arson and fraud.We know that Malcolm’s move Tuesday was a surprise. Neither campaign knew Malcolm’s complaint was coming, which indicates that it likely doesn’t involve an election day complaint of fraud, at least not one significant enough to cause McCready to call for an investigation before conceding this razor-thin result. Malcolm’s comments Tuesday also seem to indicate that the issues troubling him are ongoing. “I am not going to turn a blind eye to what took place to the best of my understanding which has been ongoing for a number of years that has repeatedly been referred to the United States attorney and the district attorneys for them to take action and clean it up,” he said. “And in my opinion those things have not taken place.”Update, 11/28, 6:30 pm: Two sources tell the editorial board that the issue specifically involves a person who allegedly gained access to absentee ballots, perhaps through voters who request them from the county or state. The ballots were filled out for Harris. This individual was suspected of similar fraud in 2016, sources said, but investigators didn’t find enough to prosecute. The number of ballots involved in the 2018 race, however, wouldn’t be enough to swing the outcome to McCready, sources said.
Complicating this even further is that when Harris ousted a more mainstream conservative incumbent, Robert Pittenger, in the GOP primary there seems to have been the same monkey business in play. WFAE reported yesterday that ‘an elections law expert says Bladen County's results for the 9th district GOP primary also deserve attention, calling them unusual.’”
In May, Harris narrowly upset incumbent Robert Pittenger in the Republican primary by 828 votes.Harris' win was powered, in part, by a surge of absentee-by-mail ballots from Bladen County, according to data from the N.C. Board of Elections. In the May primary, 22 percent of the votes cast in Bladen County in the Harris-Pittenger race were cast by absentee-by-mail, and Harris was the overwhelming winner of those ballots.Harris won 96 percent of the 456 absentee-by-mail votes in Bladen, but won only 62 percent of all other votes in the county, according to state Board of Elections records.Gerry Cohen, an elections law expert who was a state legislative attorney for more than 30 years, said the absentee-by-mail votes from Bladen are "unusual.""Clearly there is something going on in Bladen County," he said. "It's the only county in the state with an organized, street-level vote-by-mail operation. And there is nothing necessarily wrong with that."He said it's not illegal to help people request absentee by mail ballots, but someone can't collect the ballots, a process known as harvesting.At 22 percent, Bladen County easily had the highest percentage of absentee-by-mail ballots in the district. Mecklenburg County was the next highest at only 1.6 percent.Here are the percentages from the other counties in the 9th Congressional District: Union (.07 percent); Anson (0 percent); Scotland (1.5 percent); Robeson (1.1 percent); Cumberland (.08 percent); Richmond (.02 percent).After reviewing the data, Cohen said there were a large number of absentee-by-mail ballots in the primary that were requested but never returned. Cohen says one possibility is that a third party promised to mail them for voters but failed to do so.
