Even before Democrats made that fresh vow, the chaotic fight for the 9th District’s House seat had already plunged into deeper turmoil: North Carolina’s state elections board dissolved at noon Friday under a court order, two weeks before it was to hold a public hearing to consider evidence of the fraud allegations.
Friday’s political drama came more than seven weeks after Mark Harris, the Republican nominee for Congress in the 9th District, seemed to defeat Dan McCready, the Democratic candidate, by 905 votes. But Harris’ apparent victory was soon overshadowed by allegations that a contractor for his campaign engaged in illegal activity to compromise the election. According to witnesses and affidavits, the contractor, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., and people working for him collected absentee ballots in violation of state law.
The accusations led the state Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement to refuse to certify Harris as the winner and to open an investigation that has so far involved more than 100 interviews and at least 182,000 pages of records. It also gave Democrats a powerful argument to keep Harris out of office under the House’s constitutional authority to be “the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” Democrats had been signaling such a plan for weeks.
The state board issued a new round of subpoenas in the hours before its dissolution. And in a letter Friday, Joshua Malcolm, the Democrat who was chairman of the elections board, complained that Harris’ campaign had not been sufficiently responsive to a subpoena that was served weeks ago.
Malcolm said investigators had received 398 pages of campaign records — and believed there were about 140,000 other documents that could be of value to investigators.
David Freedman, Harris’ lawyer, said the campaign had “cooperated fully with the investigation.”
Before the board’s end, Harris made a final effort to have the panel certify his election. In an emergency motion to the state board, Harris’ campaign asserted it was “not aware of irregularities or other concerns sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election.”
The board, which said it received the motion at 10:15 a.m., took no action before its dissolution at noon.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.