Undecided election in embattled North Carolina district gets even more complicated
An elections volunteer claims to be holding hundreds of absentee ballots, another problem plaguing an election that is more than a month overdue in declaring a winner
The election fraud investigation of the still undecided North Carolina 9th Congressional District got another potential bombshell.
According to a new affidavit obtained by NBC News, McCrae Dowless, the Republican whose “get-out-the-vote” activities are the center of the fraud investigation, told a local political campaign volunteer that he was holding onto 800 absentee ballots.
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The state election board has been investigating allegations of irregularities and fraudulent activities related to absentee by-mail voting and potentially other matters in that race, and has not certified the initially reported election results. The recent developments have led a top state Republican Party official to “likely” support a new election.
In the signed statement, Kenneth Simmons said that he met Dowless at a local Republican Party meeting in Dublin, N.C., which is located in Bladen County, the epicenter of the investigation which focuses on absentee ballots.
Simmons said in the affidavit that he “asked him why he had not turned them in” and that Dowless responded: “you don’t do that until the last day because the opposition would know how many votes they had to make up.”
“My concern,” Simmons says in the affidavit signed on Tuesday, “was that these ballots were not going to be turned in.”
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Last week, the North Carolina state election board released a copy of an election results tape printed at Bladen County’s only in-person early vote location the Saturday before the election. Tabulating early preliminary results violates state election law.
The fraud investigation has drawn national outrage and pointed to years of hypocrisy from the GOP. Republicans have used the specter of “voter fraud” to push for voter I.D. laws centered around disenfranchising minorities.
Donald Trump, pushing the lie that he won the popular vote in 2016 and claiming that millions of illegal immigrants voted in Hillary Clinton’s favor, created a “voter fraud” task force which was quickly disbanded after no evidence was found.
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