Further proving that the real “voter fraud” that exists is voter suppression, North Carolina was forced to call for a new election after facing evidence that the 9th congressional district’s 2018 Republican candidate had paid a political operative to commit fraud on his behalf.
As of Friday, President Donald Trump and others who have spent years decrying so-called “voter fraud” were silent on the development.
Mark Harris, who ran in November against Democrat Dan McCready, announced at a hearing before the Board of Elections that he believed public confidence in the election results, which had him leading McCready by 905 votes, had been “undermined” so severely that a new election was necessary.
The five-member board unanimously agreed with Harris as they voted Thursday evening and ordered a new election be held. The move comes asa major development in what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called “one of the most egregious cases of GOP election fraud in recent memory.”
Critics noted that the president, despite having assembled a now-defunct panel to oversee “election integrity” as one of his first orders of business when he entered office in 2017 and making frequent statements about supposed illegal voting by undocumented immigrants, has had nothing to say about Harris’s participation in a fraudulent absentee ballot scheme which swayed the election in his favor.
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“Here’s my question: Where is the voter fraud crowd?” asked Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, who served on Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity, in a column earlier this week. Dunlap said he initially served on the panel in hopes of being a “voice of reason.”
“You know, the folks who cry ‘crime’ when two people named John Smith vote in the same state? Their silence in the face of seemingly serious election fraud reveals their fundamental bad faith and hucksterism,” Dunlap wrote in the Washington Post.
During the hearing before election officials, witnesses described Harris’s association with L. McCrae Dowless Jr., a political operative who ahead of the 2018 election told Harris he could assist his campaign by distributing absentee ballots in the 9th district and then not collect them.
The race between Harris and McCready was never called after the election in November, as officials raised alarm over suspicious results in Bladen County. Although Republican votes only accounted for 19 percent of the absentee ballots in the county, Harris had won nearly two-thirds of the absentee votes.
Election board chairman Robert Cordle called for a new election Thursday, decrying “the corruption, the absolute mess with the absentee ballots” and saying, “It was certainly a tainted election.”
McCready called the board’s decision a “great step forward for democracy.”
“The truth is, the myth of voter fraud is nothing more than a ploy to justify laws that make it significantly harder for racial minorities and the poor, constituencies that often lean toward Democrats, to exercise their constitutional right to vote,” wrote Dunlap. “The commitment to this fiction, rather than to the facts and the evidence, has left them blind to and uninterested in confronting the real fraud occurring right before our eyes.”
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