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In North Carolina, Investigators Find Ballot ‘Scheme’ in House Race

Kim Strach, the executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, on Monday gave the first account of investigators’ conclusions at a hearing in Raleigh, N.C., that could determine the fate of the Ninth District race after allegations of widespread fraud.Credit...Pool photo by Juli Leonard

RALEIGH, N.C. — A political operative working on behalf of a Republican candidate for Congress oversaw an illegal absentee ballot “scheme” and went to elaborate lengths to conceal it, a North Carolina election official said Monday at a hearing that could settle the final undecided House race of last year’s midterms.

The spare and harsh allegation of a “coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced” strategy opened the North Carolina State Board of Elections hearing with the first public pronouncement of state investigators’ conclusions about a get-out-the-vote effort they came to believe was endemic with fraud and misconduct to benefit Mark Harris, the Republican candidate in the Ninth Congressional District.

The state board, comprising three Democrats and two Republicans, has the power to determine whether the election results should be certified or whether a new election should be held in the Ninth District, which includes part of Charlotte and a vast stretch of southeastern North Carolina.

Kim Strach, the board’s executive director, and witnesses said that the operation involved forging signatures, completing ballots and mailing them from post offices near the voter’s home, and may have involved more than 1,000 absentee ballots or request forms.

Mr. Harris has a 905-vote lead over his Democratic rival, Dan McCready. The seat has been held by Republicans for more than half a century, but state officials last year refused to certify Mr. Harris as the winner because of concerns about the voting and “irregularities” in absentee balloting.

Ms. Strach said the scheme was masterminded by L. McCrae Dowless Jr., a longtime political operative in Bladen County who worked as a contractor for Mr. Harris’s campaign, and was carried out by a network of associates. She did not blame the candidate himself nor say that he had direct knowledge of any misconduct.

Still, board members were told Monday that people working on Mr. Harris’s behalf illegally collected absentee ballots and, in some instances, filled in incomplete ballots.

The board will continue hearing evidence on Tuesday.

A witness, Lisa Britt, also described efforts to disguise the misconduct and a recent push by Mr. Dowless to dissuade testimony during this week’s proceedings. Mr. Dowless went as far as to suggest a script for a witness to recite while invoking the constitutional protection against self-incrimination, she said.

“I can tell you that I haven’t done anything wrong in the election, and McCrae Dowless has never told me to do anything wrong, and to my knowledge he has never done anything wrong,” a proposed script shown during Ms. Britt’s testimony read.

“But I am taking the 5th Amendment because I don’t have an attorney and I feel like you will try to trip me up,” the script said. “I am taking the 5th.”

Although Mr. Dowless was called to testify on Monday evening, he declined to speak to the board. But Ms. Britt, who is Mr. Dowless’s stepdaughter and worked in his turnout operation, did not assert her Fifth Amendment protections.

Questioned by a series of grave-toned lawyers, Ms. Britt repeatedly described illegal conduct and said she had personally collected between 35 and 40 absentee ballots in violation of state law. She estimated that she had altered between five and 10 of them, but said she had not changed any votes in Mr. Harris’s race against Mr. McCready

Ms. Britt, who has a felony record and acknowledged that she had illegally cast her own ballot, also detailed some of Mr. Dowless’s efforts to keep elections officials from taking note of his absentee ballot operation.

“We didn’t mail more than nine or 10 at a time because we didn’t want that to throw up a red flag,” she testified.

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L. McCrae Dowless Jr., a longtime political operative who worked as a contractor for Mark Harris’s campaign in North Carolina’s Ninth District. Mr. Dowless or his employees were linked to at least 788 requests for absentee ballots in Bladen County, N.C.Credit...Veasey Conway for The New York Times

By late November, though, state officials were concerned about the possibility of fraud in the Ninth District. The board refused to certify Mr. Harris as the winner and ordered the inquiry that Ms. Strach said included 142 voter interviews, at least 30 interviews with subjects and witnesses, and a review of reams of documents that included financial and phone records.

“The people of North Carolina believe that our voters must have trust in our process, believe their vote must be counted, and they believe that elections must be fair,” Robert Cordle, a Democrat who chairs the elections board, said Monday. “That is why we have hearings to try to determine these things here in North Carolina.”

Mr. Cordle was the only member of the elections board to speak at length during Monday’s hearing, and the regulators appeared impassive through hours of testimony. But if four of the board’s five members ultimately conclude that “irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness,” they may order a new election.

No matter what the board decides, Monday’s revelations were an embarrassment for North Carolina Republicans, who spent years crusading against fraud — and were openly accused on Monday of underwriting misdeeds with tens of thousands of dollars in pass-through payments.

Ms. Strach’s remarks, followed by just some of the dozens of potential witnesses who were called to the North Carolina State Bar building, signaled that investigators had corroborated many of the allegations that were detailed in affidavits, interviews and news reports in recent months. Mr. Dowless, seated three rows from the back of the crowded hearing room, sat quietly and sometimes closed his eyes or bowed his head.

Mr. Dowless was called to testify near the end of Monday’s proceedings, but his lawyer said he would not address the board unless he received a form of immunity.

“I don’t think he’s going to incriminate himself because I don’t think he’s done anything wrong, but I am just telling you, it’s just not a good situation from an attorney’s standpoint to let somebody testify in a situation like that,” Cynthia Singletary, Mr. Dowless’s lawyer, said after the hearing.

Although Mr. Harris acknowledged in December that he had directed Mr. Dowless’s hiring, the Republican candidate’s allies have depicted Mr. Dowless as something of a rogue operative.

Ms. Britt testified Monday that she believed Mr. Dowless had been in close touch with one of Mr. Harris’s campaign consultants, but she said she did not believe Mr. Harris had done anything improper.

“I think you’ve got one innocent person in this whole thing who had no clue as to what was going on, and he’s the one getting the really bad end of the deal here, and that’s Mr. Mark Harris,” Ms. Britt said. Later, another witness testified that Mr. Dowless had spoken to Mr. Harris about how well he was faring.

And so even in a state capital that has lately been a hub of headspinning political debates, Monday’s hearing regularly bordered on the surreal. Before the proceedings began, a young girl stood next to her mother in the cold and held a sign reading: “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Votes!”

Inside the State Bar building, the Libertarian candidate stood in the lobby to hand out news releases and offer banana walnut bread. And outside Witness Room 2 stood Mr. Dowless, his hands in the pockets of his suit.

The partisan stakes of Monday’s hearing — sporadically contentious and with potentially far-reaching consequences — were inescapable. The North Carolina Democratic Party fired off email after email about the revelations, and Marc E. Elias, among the leading elections lawyers for Democratic candidates, guided witnesses through cross-examination.

Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, tweeted throughout the hearing while Mr. Harris watched, almost always stone-faced and his arms sometimes crossed, in silence.

But Mr. Harris, and virtually everyone else in the hearing room, knew that the state board’s eventual decision might not be the final word. The House has the constitutional authority to be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members,” and rows ahead of Mr. Dowless, and just a few yards from Mr. Harris, a man quietly observed hours of the proceedings.

His seat was reserved for a lawyer for the House.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: In North Carolina, Investigators Report Absentee Ballot ‘Scheme’ in House Race. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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