Out of around two hundred and eighty thousand votes cast in the November election for North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District, the Republican Mark Harris prevailed over the Democrat Dan McCready by a margin of nine hundred and five. Harris, a former senior pastor of the First Baptist Church in Charlotte, scored victories in only two of the eight counties in the district, which runs along the border with South Carolina. Both were Republican strongholds, rural and sparsely populated, but they were enough to put him over the top. As Harris celebrated his victory on election night, he said, “I have to say, as I look at that map tonight, thank God for Bladen and Union County.”
The North Carolina State Board of Elections, which has twice refused to certify the results in the Ninth District, now plans to hear evidence from an investigation into allegations of widespread electoral fraud committed by an operative for the Republican campaign. Testimony submitted in a set of affidavits outlined a type of scheme known as ballot harvesting, in which people are hired to pose as state employees to collect absentee mail-in ballots from voters and then either alter the ballots to support preferred candidates or destroy those that support an opponent. According to previously unreported court documents, operatives in Bladen County, which has become the epicenter of the current scandal, have been accused of tampering with absentee ballots for at least the past three election cycles. The documents also allege that the conspiracy involved some of the most powerful individuals in the region, including the county sheriff and the head of the local Republican Party, both of whom were connected to a local Republican political consultant named Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr.
Dowless’s name appeared in the affidavits submitted, in November, to the North Carolina State Board of Elections by a lawyer for the state’s Democratic Party, and statistical analyses have revealed alarming patterns in Bladen and neighboring Robeson County, where Dowless also operated, including a disproportionately low return rate of absentee mail-in ballots from minority voters, who are more likely to vote Democrat. Earlier this week, the investigative blog Popular Information reported that it had obtained a hundred and sixty-two absentee mail-in ballots, of which a hundred and thirty were witnessed by eight people, some of whom are associated with Dowless; Ginger Eason, who had collected thirty-one ballots as part of that group, admitted to the Charlotte TV station WSOC that she was paid between seventy-five and a hundred dollars a week to pick up finished absentee ballots and deliver them to Dowless. A second woman later admitted to participating in the scheme when asked by WSOC, saying that she had not believed it to be illegal because Dowless “had been doing it for years.”
A source familiar with Dowless’s operation, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, said, “Right now, people think what happened in 2018 was a lot of people walking around randomly and knocking on doors looking for absentee ballots. No. Those people knew what they were doing, and they were coördinated by Leslie McCrae Dowless.” Dowless, who is sixty-two, has a long criminal history, including several misdemeanors, for bouncing checks and unpaid taxes, and at least one felony conviction of fraud: in 1990, according to Popular Information, Dowless, who then owned an auto-sales company, forged the signature of an employee who had died in a car crash on a backdated life-insurance policy. Dowless’s checkered past, however, did not prevent Bladen County officials and other political campaigns, including Harris’s, from employing him to help get out the vote. The source who was familiar with Dowless’s operation said, “Bladen’s elected officials are familiar with Dowless, and a good portion of them have hired him. If you want to be elected in Bladen County, you do not want him working against you." (Dowless did not immediately respond to calls for comment.)
According to court documents obtained by The New Yorker, allegations of electoral fraud against Dowless date back to at least 2014, when Dowless was involved in potentiallyillegal efforts to get Jim McVicker elected as Bladen County sheriff. A sworn statement submitted, in September 2017, by Jeffrey S. Smith, the owner of two video-sweepstakes businesses—a controversial enterprise involving playing video games to win cash prizes—describes a scheme in which Smith at least partially funded Dowless’s ballot-harvesting efforts. According to the affidavit, in September 2014, the head of the Bladen County Republican Party, Landon Bordeaux, who was helping run McVicker’s campaign, told Smith that the current sheriff was planning to raid Smith’s establishments. But if McVicker were elected, Bordeaux allegedly suggested, Smith would have no problems with law enforcement. According to Smith’s testimony, later that month, Bordeaux “contacted Mr. Smith and said that the campaign needed funds to support a voting drive by McCrae Dowless who was helping the campaign. Mr. Bordeaux asked Mr. Smith to give the $4,000 to Mr. McCrae Dowless in cash.” (Bordeaux did not respond to requests for comment.)
Over the next month, the affidavit describes Smith giving two more contributions—bringing the total to fifty-eight hundred dollars—directly to Dowless to support his efforts for McVicker’s campaign. In the affidavit, Smith alleged to have “learned from various members of the campaign and from speaking directly to Mr. Dowless that he had been hired by Sheriff McVicker’s campaign to recruit workers to visit voters, ask the voter to submit an absentee ballot request, and follow up with those voters once they received their ballots to ensure that the voters turned them in, and also to confirm that they had voted for Sheriff McVicker.” McVicker won the election by approximately three hundred and fifty votes, and Smith estimated that Dowless had obtained around eight hundred absentee ballot votes for McVicker.
After the election, according to Smith’s affidavit, McVicker personally acknowledged Smith’s financial support. But the alliance did not last long. In May of 2015, McVicker led a dramatic raid, backed by helicopter support, on Smith’s video-sweepstakes operations, in Dublin, North Carolina. Smith sued McVicker, a sheriff’s deputy named Travis Deaver, and the local district attorney, Jonathan David. It is from this lawsuit—and its many depositions, claims, and counterclaims—that further details of the alleged election fraud have been drawn. (McVicker’s chief deputy Larry Guyton said that the sheriff had “no comment.”)
A four-page affidavit signed by Dowless largely corroborates Smith’s account. In sworn testimony, Dowless describes coördinating twenty workers, whom he paid fifty dollars in cash per day, to help get out the vote for McVicker. Dowless also says that, in late September of 2014, he was informed by Bordeaux that the campaign was seeking donations from Smith. Dowless describes accepting an initial cash payment of four thousand dollars from Smith, in order to pay himself and the members of his team, and an additional eighteen hundred in cash during the campaign, all of which would have amounted to illegal contributions. “I do not know how Mr. Bordeaux, Sheriff McVicker, and his campaign accounted in its campaign records for the cash contributions for Mr. Smith,” Dowless states in the affidavit.
While Smith was sidelined by the damage to his business, Dowless was just expanding his operation. In the 2016 election cycle, Dowless worked for Todd Johnson, an insurance salesman from Union County, who was running in the House Republican primary against Harris and Robert Pittenger. According to the Washington Post, Johnson received two hundred and eleven mail-in votes, compared to just four for Harris and one for Pittenger, who ultimately won the race. But, during the 2016 election, Dowless was not just helping other candidates—he was also running as the incumbent vice-chairman of the Soil and Water Conservation District board, a nonpartisan elected position.
According to Patsy Sheppard, a local Democratic Party official, a Democratic political-action committee tried to unseat Dowless using a campaign that relied heavily on mail-in absentee ballots for a write-in candidate. Dowless ended up winning anyway, but the incumbent Republican governor, Pat McCrory, lost by a few thousand votes to the Democrat Roy Cooper. Republicans began pushing claims of election fraud, focussing on a few hundred ballots for the write-in candidate running against Dowless that featured similar handwriting. In Dowless’s complaint, he noted “shocking evidence resulting from a blatant scheme to try to impact the voting results of an entire county and perhaps even sway statewide and federal elections.”
In December of that year, the North Carolina State Board of Elections rejected Dowless’s complaint, arguing that Republican attorneys had failed to provide substantial evidence that the effort changed the outcome of the election. But, when Dowless testified before the Board of Elections, he revealed details of his own vote-harvesting scam. As “This American Life” reported in December of 2016, Dowless told the board that he paid the members of his team for each ballot they collected, which is illegal. “One of the voters who signed an affidavit said that Get Out the Vote workers came by and had her family request absentee ballots,” “This American Life” ’s Zoe Chace reported. “But then they never received their absentee ballots in the mail like they were supposed to. Then when the family went to vote on Election Day, they were told they’d already voted.”
The State Board of Elections filed its findings, about both the Democratic PAC’s write-in efforts and Dowless, with the U.S. District Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina, which has not publicly commented or acted on the case. The following year, according to the Charlotte Observer, when one of Harris’s parishioners, Pete Givens, asked for help running for a Charlotte city-council seat, Harris recommended Dowless. (Campaign records show that Givens paid Dowless about eight hundred dollars for less than two months of work, but ended up losing the race.) Dwight Sheppard, a local Democratic poll watcher who helped arrange the affidavits this year, had assumed that Dowless’s referral to the U.S. District Attorney’s Office would be the end of the Republican operative’s work. “I was shocked to see him active again in 2018,” he said. According to the Washington Post, the Harris campaign hired Dowless through a G.O.P. consulting firm called Red Dome. Sheppard testified that he overheard people saying that Dowless would get a forty-thousand-dollar bonus from the Harris campaign if Mark Harris won. An affidavit from another person stated that Dowless had told him, during primary voting for the House race, that he was “doing absentee for both” Harris and McVicker, who was up for reëlection; that Dowless had “over 80 people working for him”; and that Dowless said he doesn’t “take checks,” so “they need to pay me cash.” Campaign finance records show that McVicker paid Dowless fifty-eight hundred dollars in 2018 for services described as “get out to vote.”
Harris ultimately ousted the incumbent Pittenger in the 2018 primary by eight hundred and twenty-eight votes, claiming ninety-six per cent of the absentee ballots in Bladen County. On Thursday, Pittenger told Spectrum News, “We were fully aware of [the accusations of fraud]. There are some pretty unsavory people, particularly out in Bladen County, and I didn’t have anything to do with them.” In November’s general election, discrepancies in the mail-in ballots out of Bladen and Robeson counties, where Dowless focussed his efforts, were also extreme: about sixteen hundred mail-in absentee ballots were requested and not returned, in a race decided by fewer than a thousand votes. The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Dowless has denied all accusations of wrongdoing. This week, a reporter with WSOC asked Dowless, “Did you pay people to pick up ballots?” Dowless replied, “At this time, I have no comment. Have a great day.”
Daniel Miller contributed reporting to this story.
