The incoming Congress will be seated in a matter of days — but the seat from the North Carolina Ninth Congressional District will be left empty, as more evidence of a brazen vote-tampering scheme piles up.
The bipartisan state elections board has refused to certify the results of Republican Mark Harris’s win and instead set a hearing on the election fraud scandal for January 11, a week after new members are sworn in.
Harris beat Democrat Dan McCready by roughly 900 votes on Election Day.
But those results have been marred by explosive allegations that an operative working for the Harris campaign collected, tampered with or even destroyed absentee ballots.
The alleged plot is now the subject of a state inquiry; the findings of the state investigation will be presented at the hearing next month.
Depending on the outcome, a new election could be called.
The state board has broad discretion under state law to call a new election if the basic fairness of the November vote is in doubt.
The evidence continues to pile up.
On Christmas Eve, Joe Bruno, a reporter for the local news outlet WSOC, added another piece to the puzzle.
NEW: Three say they gave their absentee ballots to strangers who promised to turn them in to officials.
They all said they don't know if they were turned in.
I checked the voter database. There's no record of these three voting in the 2018 election. Story at 6 @wsoctv #NC09 pic.twitter.com/S0BFyyrrSm
— Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) December 24, 2018
Three voters testified in sworn affidavits that they had filled out their absentee ballots and then given them to a person who came to their house and promised to deliver the ballots to state officials to be counted.
Bruno checked public voting records and found that none of those voters had actually had their ballots counted.
The picture isn’t yet complete, but the evidence we do have suggests that this could very well be one of the most duplicitous election fraud schemes in recent memory.
So far, there has not been an outright allegation of wrongdoing to be found here.
But the suggestion is pretty clear: Harris seems to have benefitted from an oddly high share of votes in two counties, where an operative of his was allegedly working, and where a number of voters said that their absentee ballots had been collected from them in a highly unusual manner.