He is outgoing Rep. Robert M. Pittenger, whose narrow loss to Mark Harris in the Republican primary in May is just about as studded with red flags suggesting absentee ballot fraud as the general election now under scrutiny.
As with the November general election, most of the concerns about the primary center on Harris’ extraordinary success with absentee voters in Bladen County, a rural swath of southeastern North Carolina where L. McCrae Dowless Jr., a shadowy contractor with a history of suspect voter turnout efforts, worked for Harris’ campaign.
In that primary against Pittenger, Harris won 437 of the 456 ballots cast through the mail in Bladen County; his overall margin of victory was only 828 votes. By contrast, in an earlier run against Pittinger in the 2016 primary, Harris won only four of 226 such ballots in the county. Dowless did not work for Harris in that 2016 campaign.
North Carolina officials are now examining the May primary to see whether they could establish patterns of election fraud and gather evidence for possible criminal prosecutions.
But even if fraud was found in the primary, state officials would be limited in their ability to overturn the Harris-Pittinger outcome given state law and the status of those primary results. The incoming Democratic leaders of the House of Representatives could refuse to seat a winner from the 9th District, leading to a do-over primary and general election, but it is unclear if Rep. Nancy Pelosi and her allies would opt for that.
“I’m old fashioned, but anytime somebody may have broken the law, it’s appropriate for the state to look into it,” said Carter Wrenn, the dean of North Carolina’s Republican strategists. “If they found that somebody broke the law in the primary, they ought to punish them. Just because the primary got certified, if you broke the law to win it, that doesn’t get you off the hook.”
The potential chicanery in the November balloting, when Harris appeared to prevail over his Democratic rival, Dan McCready, by 905 votes, may lead to a new general election, and delay any resolution to who will next represent the district in Congress.
State investigators, who announced last week that Dowless was “a person of interest” in the inquiry into the general election, have not made any public accusations of wrongdoing in response to allegations that Dowless and his associates violated state law by improperly collecting or completing absentee ballots this fall.
J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College, who has examined the Bladen County balloting in the primary, noted that 156 Bladen absentee ballots went unreturned in this year’s primary, the highest number of any county in a district that includes far larger counties.
Dowless, a 62-year-old former car salesman with past convictions for fraud and perjury, has repeatedly declined to comment about the current controversy, and his lawyer did not respond to messages.
As Democrats and Republicans alike gird for the possibility of a new election, hints that Dowless was deeply involved in the primary season have begun to emerge. Dowless told one man, who described the encounter in an affidavit, that he had a team of more than 80 people working for him in an operation that stretched far beyond the county’s borders.
And in Bladen County, one volunteer for a local candidate, Kenneth Simmons, said Dowless boasted that he was hoarding hundreds of completed ballots to bolster his clients. Simmons’ own affidavit, provided by a lawyer for the state Democratic Party, was released Tuesday.
Weeks before the May 8 vote, Simmons, a former Bladen County sheriff’s deputy, attended a meeting for supporters of Billy Ward, a candidate who hoped to knock off the incumbent county sheriff, James A. McVicker, in the Republican primary.
Simmons and his wife, Kelly Diane Simmons, knew that Dowless was working to get Harris elected. “He tried to get me to vote for him,” Kenneth Simmons recalled in an interview Monday with The New York Times, before his affidavit was released.
The couple said they assumed Dowless was trying to help the Ward campaign, too — although Ward, in a separate interview Monday, said that while Dowless attended his team’s meetings, he never formally worked for the campaign.
“I can’t trust him, but he’s the guru, sir,” said Ward, a police captain in nearby Tabor City. “He’s unscrupulous.”
The Simmonses said that at one point during the meeting, Dowless spoke to them while holding a thick packet of documents that they could not see up close. They said Dowless boasted to them that he had 800 or 900 signed and completed absentee ballots in his possession, and that he planned on turning them in to the county Board of Elections just before the deadline. (In the end, state officials reported just 811 absentee-by-mail ballots were cast throughout the entire 9th District in the Republican congressional primary.)
Simmons said that he was not well-versed enough in state election law to know that possessing another person’s absentee ballots is, in most cases, illegal. But he had other questions.
“What I couldn’t comprehend is, if you get the ballots why don’t you go ahead and turn them in every week?” Simmons said. “Why hold them?”
“I asked him why he had not turned them in,” Simmons said in the affidavit. “He stated you don’t do that until the last day because the opposition would know how many votes they had to make up.”
Simmons added: “My concern was that these ballots were not going to be turned in.”
At another meeting of Ward supporters a few days later, the couple were told that Dowless had begun working for McVicker’s campaign and would no longer be associating with the Ward team.
Ward ended up losing the primary to McVicker by more than 1,700 votes. State records show that McVicker, whose campaign was the target of a subpoena from the state elections board, paid Dowless $1,800 on the day before the primary.
At the time, Dowless was also on the payroll for Harris’ strategists, just two years after Harris’ first primary run against Pittenger failed, in part, because of his trouncing in absentee-by-mail voting. In a race where each of his rivals accrued at least 411 absentee-by-mail votes, Harris had just 195. He lost by 134 votes.
“I’m sure as he was planning his campaign this time, he probably calculated that he needed a strong grassroots showing,” said Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition, which supported the insurgent bids by Harris, a longtime pastor, against Pittenger. “As far as I can tell, Mark definitely learned some things as he went through his first two campaigns, but he’s always been a good candidate as far as his appreciation for what’s right and what’s truthful and what’s virtuous.”
Still, Pittenger ran this year’s race with what seemed to be a strengthened hand compared with his 2016 faceoff with Harris. Perhaps most important, the FBI had ended, without charges, an inquiry into the congressman’s business interests. But Pittenger also had other advantages that came with incumbency: money, name recognition and the prestige of power.
About a month before the primary, The Charlotte Observer published a column that barely mentioned Harris and instead gamed out a race between Pittenger and Dan McCready, who became the Democratic nominee.
Pittenger was hardly unaware of the kind of disruption Dowless could potentially unleash in the race, and particularly in Bladen County. During the 2016 election, Pittenger recalled in a statement last week, he met with Dowless, “but quickly ended the meeting over personal concerns with his proposal.”
“We didn’t talk long enough for me to gather detailed information,” said Pittenger, who, through a spokesman, declined further comment. “I just knew I didn’t want to be involved with him.”
Dowless eventually worked for Todd Johnson, who won the absentee-by-mail vote in 2016. And in the next election cycle, Dowless found his way to the Harris campaign, brought on by Red Dome Group, a political consulting firm that served as Harris’ strategists. The extent of Harris’ personal dealings with Dowless are unclear, and in a video released last week, Harris said he was “absolutely unaware of any wrongdoing.”
They were not strangers, however. Harris met with Dowless, according to Pete Givens, then a candidate for Charlotte City Council. Givens said he attended a meeting alongside Harris, whose spokesman did not respond to a message, last year at a furniture store in Elizabethtown, the seat of Bladen County.
Republicans are bracing for the findings of the state elections board, which is expected to meet before Christmas. The evidence presented to the board, and its decision on whether or not to order a new general election, may intensify debate over whether Pittenger should have given public voice to any worries about fraud in the primary.
“Part of what you don’t know is if they just spent a lot of money and had a good operation or whether there’s something funky going on,” Wrenn, the Republican strategist, said of the Harris campaign. “If Pittenger thought there was something funky going on, he should have called for an investigation.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.