Republican Who Tried To Steal Election Runs For Same Office Again ... Gee, Sounds Familiar.
North Carolina's shady congressional candidate Mark Harris is back!
Republican Mark Harris won — in the loosest sense of the word — the North Carolina ninth district congressional race in 2018, but he never served a day in Congress. The state election board refused to certify the results and ordered an election reprise (a “do-over election” if you aren’t from the theatre) due to compelling allegations of fraud.
McCrae Dowless, an operative of the Harris campaign, had allegedly organized an illegal scheme to collect and mark absentee ballots. “Allegedly” is generous here, as Dowless was later indicted on three felony counts of obstruction of justice, two counts of conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice and two counts of possession of absentee ballots. (He died before the case went to trial.)
Harris declined to compete in the do-over election, which Rep. Dan Bishop eventually won. (His ninth district became the eighth starting this year.) Bishop is running for state attorney general next year and is vacating his seat. Guess who wants it? That’s right: Harris announced last week that he’s running yet again for the seat he almost successfully stole. Better luck next time, as Donald Trump probably says.
Harris declared in an announcement video: “[In] 2020, Democrats stole the election from Donald Trump. The year before, they did it to me. Well, in 2024, President Trump is making a comeback, and so am I.”
If you read the first couple paragraphs of this post or even just existed in 2018, you’d appreciate how much Harris is lying here. No one stole the election from Harris (or Trump). It was actually quite the opposite.
As I wrote at the time, “According to sworn statements, voters in Bladen and Robeson counties, near the South Carolina border, claim people showed up at their homes and urged them to hand over their absentee ballots, sometimes without filling them out. Others say they received absentee ballots by mail that they had not requested. This is all very illegal.”
Harris is hardly a stellar candidate. Even with all the electoral skullduggery, he only narrowly led Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes. Bishop did much better, winning by almost 4,000 votes. Of course, the special election was held in September 2019 and McCready was no longer buoyed by the previous year’s blue wave. Guess all the fraud ultimately worked out for Republicans — funny that.
Harris reportedly suffered two strokes in January 2019 and struggled during the state election board hearings. He burst into tears somewhat pathetically when his son, John, testified that he’d warned his father about Dowless’ illegal tactics. Harris had claimed that he was unaware of any wrongdoing, hence all the crying, as his son’s testimony made it clear he was a liar.
From NBC News:
John Harris provided email exchanges with his father about Dowless’ apparent practices in the 2016 race, including an email in April 2017, just prior to Harris’ hiring of Dowless, where he told his father that it is a felony to mail someone else’s ballot and that it is “a legal gray area” even if Dowless put the ballot in a voters’ own mailbox.
Typical Democrats stealing elections by not letting Republicans get away with stealing them. Oh, and most of the people who ruled the election null and void were themselves Republicans.
Anyway, although Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman didn’t pursue charges against Harris, that wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. He should probably stay out of politics.
[Politico]
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Good morning. Still pissed at NBC.
It's really not “a legal gray area even if Dowless put the ballot in a voters’ own mailbox." It's a federal offense to put something in a person's mailbox. They're for postage-paid US mail delivered by the USPS only and a person could be fined up to $5,000 and an organization $10,000 for doing that.