ALAN BLINDER & MICHAEL WINES: GOP cries against voter fraud go mostly quiet after scheme tied to party
Saturday, Feb. 23, 2019 -- Republicans have railed against the threat of voter fraud. Some have made unproven claims about how rampant it has become to pass voter ID laws and open sweeping investigations to protect sanctity of the vote at all costs. But when a hard-fought 9th Congressional District election was overturned because of election fraud by a Republican operative, the party was measured, and largely muted, in its response.
Posted — UpdatedRepublican politicians across the country have for years railed against the threat of voter fraud. Some have made unproven claims about how rampant it has become in order to pass voter ID laws and open sweeping investigations. The sanctity of the vote, they have said, must be protected at all costs.
But when a hard-fought congressional election in North Carolina — in which a Republican candidate appeared to narrowly beat his Democratic opponent — was overturned this week because of election fraud by a Republican political operative, the party was measured, and largely muted, in its response.
Mark Harris, the Republican nominee, had eked out a 905-vote lead over Dan McCready. But the North Carolina Board of Elections refused to certify Harris as the winner and opened an investigation into irregularities. This week, the five-member board, made up of Republicans and Democrats, convened an evidentiary hearing in Raleigh at which witnesses described a voter-turnout effort that relied on the rogue collection of absentee ballots.
In several hours of testimony Thursday, after his campaign acknowledged that it had withheld damning records from the board, Harris denied wrongdoing but also appeared to mislead regulators. He then surprised everyone by abandoning his claim to the 9th Congressional District seat, which covers part of Charlotte and much of southeastern North Carolina.
Witnesses detailed how people working for a Harris campaign operative, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., had filled out parts of some absentee ballots and improperly collected others. On Friday, Lorrin Freeman, the district attorney in Wake County, said she could seek charges within weeks against Dowless and some of the people he hired.
“Obviously, it’s within the province of the grand jury as to whether they will return indictments,” Freeman said. “But do I anticipate there will be a criminal prosecution going forward? I do.”
State Republicans, who over the past few years have tightened voting laws and had fought to preserve Harris’ victory, were far less vociferous in denouncing voter fraud than they have been in the past.
On Friday, state Sen. Phil Berger, president pro tempore of the North Carolina Senate and among the most powerful Republicans in Raleigh, said Harris should have heeded warnings that Dowless could not be trusted.
“If you failed to take notice of the things that are there to see and the things that you’re hearing that are repeated by people that you ought to trust, I think you deserve a fair amount of criticism,” he said.
Berger, who said he had been surprised by Harris’ decision to ask the elections board to order a new election, did not say whether Harris should run again. (In an interview, McCready said Friday that he would run in the new election, which has not been scheduled.)
“I think there was enough going on to create questions, and the results were close enough where we just needed to clean this out and start over,” Berger said in an interview at the Legislative Building.
Berger, who helped craft a voter ID law that a federal appeals court later said contained provisions that targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision,” said he expected the 9th District case to lead to new discussions about how to combat fraud in North Carolina.
But Trump said he looked forward to a final report on the disputed election in that state.
No one has been more vocal about the evils of rigged votes than Trump, who has repeatedly made the false claim that the 2016 election, in which he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, was rife with Democratic fraud.
“Cheat at your own peril,” he warned.
“People who downplay it say it’s just a small percentage of the total vote, but that argument is meaningless in a close race,” he said. In a column on Breitbart News, Kobach suggested that the case was a comeuppance for Democrats and voting-rights advocates who oppose the stringent controls on voting that Republicans have enacted for a decade or more. But those restrictions, limiting who can vote and how ballots are cast, only shield elections from cheating by individual voters, a kind of fraud that experts say is exceptionally rare.
The party has given scant attention to the more frequent kind of election fraud — the inside-job schemes in which campaigns or election officials manufacture fake votes and destroy their opponents’ real ones — that appears to have taken place in the 9th District race. Absentee ballots are especially susceptible to manipulation.
On Friday, Berger, the Republican state senator, resisted suggestions that his party had ignored the fraud potential and noted that state law already banned the misconduct outlined at the hearing this week. But he said, “I think it’s clear that something needs to be done if there’s a reasonable thing that can be done.”
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