The North Carolina State Board of Elections will hold two — and possibly, three — days of hearings starting Feb. 18 on allegations that an operative tied to a Republican’s U.S. House campaign engaged in absentee ballot fraud last year.
The hearing, according to The News and Observer, was announced by the recently reworked elections board Monday. While the board only expects the hearing to last two days, it has reserved the site of the hearing for three days, the News and Observer reported.
The fraud allegations center on an absentee ballot operation run by a local operative, Leslie Dowless McCrae, who has denied wrongdoing. McCrae has been connected to the campaign of Republican Mark Harris, who unofficially won the North Carolina 6th District congressional race by 905 votes. His race has not been certified by the board due to the allegations.
I know they can order a new election. Can they also disqualify candidate for cheating?
The North Carolina Dems need to come down hard on this. It’s a fight they can’t lose. I hope they have a platoon of lawyers to piece this together.
I beleive that the newly constituted election board has 3 Democrats (appointed by Gov. Cooper) and 2 republicans appointed by Cooper off a list that the republicans submitted.
But given that the republicans on the old board (whose make-up was overturned by the NC Courts) would not certify the results, I think its a forgone conclusion that a new election is going to happen.
The problem is that there is a LOT of evidence that the Dowless (the republican operative hired by the corrupt republican preacher/candidate) not only submitted fraudulent ballots, but that he destroyed ballots that he thought were for the Democratic candidate.
No. But if permitted, his party can re-run the primary and attempt to get someone else nominated. Under the old laws (up until sometime in Jan 2019) a new election would be run with the same candidates as the invalidated one. The NC legislature is trying to (or maybe already has) rewrite the law such that a new election means new primaries too. They don’t like Harris much even if he is electable.
And so it continues