Sometimes, political reporting is fun. The process of electing our leaders brings out all sorts of colorful characters: too-eager canvassers, mountebank consultants, conspiratorial locals, clueless federales, legendary ratfuckers, and, when we’re lucky, criminals so brazen that they bring a note of much-needed levity to the circus.
Leslie McCrae Dowless, thank you for being you; for, as Cole Porter once wrote, doing that voodoo, that you do, so well.
Dowless, we now know, appears to have been the ring leader in an election fraud scheme so obvious, it’s almost beautiful: Dowless and his deputies, perhaps with the direct knowledge of Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris himself, went around the 9th Congressional District collecting voters’ signatures on absentee ballots, then taking the ballots, unsealed, with them, voters say.
Wouldn’t you know, some ballots ended up filled out, sealed, and submitted to the state — a small handful of witnesses are listed on dozens of ballots, WSOC and Popular Information first reported. Other ballots, disproportionately belonging to minority voters, according to The News & Observer, went largely unreturned.
In Bladen County, Harris won 61 percent of mail-in absentee ballots, though just 19 percent of voters who received absentee ballots there are registered Republicans. Something is rotten in the state of North Carolina.
Things are happening: The state’s elections board has refused to certify a winner, and Harris’ campaign and Red Dome Group — which both employed McCrae Dowless and was paid by the Harris campaign — have been subpoenaed for documents. Democrat Dan McCready has withdrawn his concession and the state Republican Party has shown an unusual openness to tossing out the whole election and starting over, though only after calling for Harris to be certified the winner. Likely incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has left open the possibility of not seating Harris.
Dowless has gone from denying wrongdoing to having no comment.
Across the country this week, Republicans have shown what could be called an admirably bold preference for ignoring democracy: In Wisconsin, Republican legislators sought to hamstring an incoming Democratic governor who proved trustworthy to voters, but not agreeable enough to the lame ducks in current power. In Michigan, in order to dodge a referendum, Republican legislators wrote their own bill covering a minimum wage hike and paid sick time — then watered everything down after Election Day had safely passed.
This is serious stuff, and so too is McCrae Dowless’ alleged criminal scheme to disenfranchise voters.
But you’ve got to hand it to the man: Were Hasbro to make an electoral version of “Clue,” we’d have a clear contender for its template. It was Dowless! In Bladen County! With the unsealed ballots!
For providing the TPM staff’s collective eyebrow a strenuous workout, McCrae Dowless is our Duke of the Week.
Well Dowless seems to have perfected his mode of election fraud after successfully succeeding in two previous elections. I wonder who taught him this trick?
It seems everyone is missing a big part of the story. Some of those people never requested an absentee ballot. That anyway was what one said. That means fraud was used to request said ballots. That’s really something.
Think about it. How did Dowless and company know who had an absentee ballot? What better way than to send them one, somehow. Now it is possible they simply got lists of names and addressees which in itself is pretty suspect leagally but is surely an ethical breech by the officials in charge of voting.
Still, sending ballots to people would be the very best way to pull this off because low information voters would be perhaps befuddled by getting it but not likely think something was amiss when someone came to collect it. Whereas experienced absentee voters might smell rat.
Additionally, and getting back to getting access to voter info and perhaps even directing the ballots be sent on the front end, this had to have an inside component.
He’s also Douche Bag of the Week…
The GOP will weaponize this concept of “not seating” someone, and seating their opponent instead.
The GOP majority will simply refuse to seat Dems if it means losing their majority in the Senate. Once they re-take the House (and they will), they’ll do the same thing there.
EDIT: btw, I’m not saying the GOP will do this if and only if Pelosi refuses to seat Harris. I’m saying they will do it, regardless, now that we’ve drawn their attention to the option.
The voter registration records are public, but the available information varies from state to state. Apparently in NC, requests for absentee ballots become public information as soon as they are received.It is a simple matter to go in daily and harvest the requests for absentee ballots. Once you have the names, it isn’t difficult to get addresses even they aren’t provided in the request information.
Now, it’s possible that Dowless and his merry band were making their own requests and intercepting the mail. If that can be proven, Dowless can be charged with mail tampering – a Federal charge. Not smart, dude, not smart.
They’ve known about this all along – no one’s telling them anything they don’t already know. In a Parliamentary sense, it’s a difficult weapon to deploy. I’m not saying that they won’t make use of it in the future, but it’s not just a matter of deciding not to seat the incoming Democrats.