Here’s another article. This isn’t the first time strange stuff has happened in that county’s elections.
That’s a big-fucking-deal crime.
So who takes over the responsibilities of the elections board after it’s dissolved? (The WaPo story says “the current board is scheduled to dissolve early next week.”) It looks unlikely that they will certify the NC-09 result by then, so who would be legally empowered to make that call afterwards?
Rural North Carolina: Mississippi in all but name. :eek:
It’s hard to tell what was more rampant from the stories: getting people to not vote by collecting (then not turning in) their ballots, or getting people to vote for a specific candidate, by collecting, then “finishing” their ballot for them. :dubious:
California, btw, now legally allows harvested ballots. Some of California’s rural counties aren’t so different from North Carolina’s.
It sounds like there’s at least one person, McCrae Dowless, that needs to spend a long time looking at the inside of a prison. It looks like he may have engaged in this sort of illegal (and, conservative get ready to roll your eyes, totally racist) voter suppression for years. So the real question is, what other folks knew about what he was doing, and when did they know it?
Anyone who has ever expressed any concern over voter fraud ought to be all over this story.
once again they did not certify the 9th district race
No one really knows yet, as the legislature and the governor’s office are still negotiating on what happens once the current board dissolves. The court granted a 2-week stay on the dissolution yesterday (Friday the 30th). So for time the time being we just have the usual legislative clusterfuck.
The House itself has the final say, doesn’t it? If this is all swept under the rug and NC eventually declares that there’s nothing to see here, move along folks, Harris is the winner, I could see the Democratic-controlled House voting not to seat him come January. It’d be a big in-your-face to all the people who (as LHoD notes) scream and yell and moan about “voter fraud” but don’t mind it when it comes from their side of the aisle, and it would ultimately force a new election. Don’t know that it would happen that way, but if it looks like this is going to go uninvestigated I’d say there’s a decent chance.
Remember how close the 2016 governor race was? McCrae Dowless almost certainly made that election appear to be closer than it actually was as well.
If there isn’t a major investigation, there’s no way the House should seat this guy. It’s possible that an investigation will clear Dowless of wrongdoing–but if that happens it almost certainly means either someone else is committing voter fraud, or someone else is organizing false affadavits. In any case, though, we really need to get to the bottom of this case. It is different from literally any other voter fraud case I’ve heard of in 21st century America, but I doubt that it’s unique except that other cases have gone undiscovered.
Just wanted to say that I’m glad this thread exists and to give a big “thank you” to alla y’all who’ve been keeping it updated. This is far from local news for me, but I’m interested and concerned; it’s an important story.
The state elections board chairman, Democrat Andy Penry, has now resigned.
But of course :rolleyes:
I don’t intuitively follow your logic. I do agree that if every district drawn contained an exact mixture of all racial and political populations as in the entire state, the high possibility is that in many cases, minority and minor party voters will be underrepresented in the final results. But, and it is a big but, it would be fairer than having the majority party, elected in great part due to gerrymandered districts, continuing for generations cutting up the districts to insure they will remain in power. I think, with the power of computing these days, any number of simulations based on various district drawing algorithms can be run and the one that seems to accurately represent the overall population of a state chosen. ???
I think it has been recognized. “Harvesting” absentee ballots is a known problem. If, however, a party, knowing the name and address of every registered party member, get such ballots, takes them to the voter, gets their vote and returns the ballot to the polling place, what is so illegal about that? The real problem would be if absentee ballots are illicitly filled out, not by the voter, and slipped into the count later. If I can imagine it, there are those folks who imagine it and do it, probably on both sides.
Shortest answer, what’s so illegal about it is that it is (if I understand correctly) against the law.
And I think that law makes sense. (is that the question you were actually asking?) We have a few principles in play. First, ballots should be secret; second, ballots should be uninfluenced by bribes or threats; third, ballots should be secure. Letting political operatives go around picking up ballots to return to the polling place threatens all three principles. The ballots aren’t secure, since those political operatives could look at the ballots and throw out the ones they don’t like. The ballots may not be secret, for the same reason.
And a political operative could easily set up a reward/threat system: “Hey, if you let me watch you fill out your ballot for Jane Doe, I’ll give you a bottle of gin,” or, “I work for Mega Furniture Corp, and golly, so do you, and our boss has asked me to check that people are voting the right way, so why don’t you fill out your ballot right here?” Of course, they could also be much more subtle than that.
This case illustrates what can go wrong with harvesting ballots. It appears (and please correct me if I’m missing something) that operatives went to poor black neighborhoods and convinced people to sign up for absentee ballots, then told people to turn them in incomplete, looked at the ballots, and either filled them out for the Republican candidate if they were incomplete, or simply threw them away if they included a vote for the Democratic candidate. That sort of behavior is far too easy to do if people can go around collecting ballots; it makes sense to me to have a law against it.
Illegal in North Carolina, legal in California since 2016. Reason many Republicans are crying foul about their bloodbath there.
I can see both pros and cons - the idea in CA was simply to make it easier for more people to vote. But the potential for fraud does increase slightly.
To me, there seems to be a clear dividing line:
Collecting ballots that have been sealed and signed is fine. That’s a convenience for the voter.
Collecting ballots that have not been sealed should be illegal. There’s a definite potential for tampering there.
No question. I’m fairly sure that is always illegal.
ETA: Also in the CA law as amended - Any person in charge of a vote by mail ballot and who knowingly and willingly engages in criminal acts related to that ballot as described in Division 18 (commencing with Section 18000), including, but not limited to, fraud, bribery, intimidation, and tampering with or failing to deliver the ballot in a timely fashion, is subject to the appropriate punishment specified in that division.
I suppose that you could still go to areas that are likely to vote for your opponent, convince the people there to vote absentee, collect their ballots, and then throw them all out, thereby disenfranchising all those who would have voted anyway. Which would still be illegal, if you got caught, but might be a little more difficult to prove.
For what it’s worth, Nate Silver has stated that the most likely explanation for the irregularities in NC is fraud.
“The simplest explanation for these irregularities is that someone associated with the @MarkHarrisNC9 campaign committed fraud involving absentee-by-mail ballots in both the primary and the general. I’m open to other explanations, but I haven’t heard any yet.”
I think folks who vote absentee can check whether their ballots were ever received. If a large group of people sign affidavits that Joe Schmoe (or “this tall lanky-looking white dude with glasses and a buzz cut”) collected their ballots, and that they were never received, prosecution would be possible.