North Carolina’s state board of elections voted late today to order a new election in the disputed 9th Congressional District, where no winner was declared in the 2018 midterms amid fraud allegations.
The board voted unanimously to call a new House race after hearing testimony that the November election between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready was tainted by a scheme to collect and mark voters’ absentee ballots.
“It certainly was a tainted election,” said board chairman Bob Cordle, a Democrat. “I believe the people of North Carolina deserve a fair election.”
“This did not help the reputation of North Carolina, but we’ve turned the corner now,” added Republican David Black, a member of the board.
North Carolina will set dates for the new election, including a new primary, at a subsequent meeting.
This comes days after the board said its investigation found evidence that a political operative working on behalf of Harris had coordinated an “unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme,” including efforts of a cover-up.
Harris told the board moments before its unanimous ruling to order a new election to settle the country’s last unresolved midterm House race — a sharp reversal from his previous calls and a failed court challenge last month for election officials to certify him. It did not immediately set a date.
Harris holds an unofficial 905-vote lead over his Democratic opponent, but the board had declined to certify him as a winner last year due to claims of “numerous” absentee voting irregularities and later launched a probe.
John Harris, an assistant U.S. attorney in Raleigh, said under oath Wednesday that he had expressed misgivings about Dowless to his father in 2017 after analyzing absentee-ballot returns in 9th district in 2016. The elder Harris had narrowly lost the GOP primary and Dowless worked for the another Republican candidate.
The younger Harris’ testimony contradicted his father’s claim last month that he never heard any red flags about Dowless before hiring him.
While the National Republican Congressional Committee remained quiet about the ongoing scandal and does not weigh in on primaries, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is expected to throw its weight behind McCready in the new election.
“What we have seen unfold in North Carolina is an all-out assault on our fundamental American values, and Mark Harris is correct when he said that his actions have undermined North Carolinians’ faith in our election process,” DCCC chairwoman Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) said in a statement. “I look forward to joining with countless others in this special election to do the hard work of repairing the harm Mark Harris, and Republicans in North Carolina, have caused.”