Talk Elections

https://twitter.com/POLITICO_Steve/status/1067527363297185792

Citing "Misconduct that has been ongoing for a number of years" but refusing to give any details, the NC State Board of Elections has refused to certify NC-09's results at this time.

   Mark Harris (R)     49.3    138,893

Dan McCready (D)     48.9    137,895

Jeff Scott (Libertarian)     1.8    5,101

Is how the results currently look. NC's State Board of Elections is supposedly currently looking into misconduct and irregularities in the race. The SBOE has two options: Certify Harris at the winner later after the investigation, or call for a new election and throw the election out.

Beyond the electoral significance, I really, really want to know what they claim is the misconduct here. 0.4% is a narrow margin, but not an absurdly narrow one.

Either way, it's possible that NC-09 becomes the first special election of 2019.

()

Come on, Seat #41!

The D is probably favored in that case, due to the usual D overpreformance in specials.

I want to believe, but I don't want to get my hopes up...

henster posted more details in the general election night thread:


That's strange enough to warrant a deeper look.

I don't want to get my hopes up, especially since we all know how the right would respond to the idea of redoing the election (even if some of those who vote on that are Republicans themselves), but it would be so nice for Mark Harris not to be in the House. He's definitely the worst new member.

If nothing else, I want a reporter to visit the precinct which doubled (!) turnout between 2016 and 2018 while the county as a whole saw turnout go down 12%. Must be a fascinating place.

It's almost as though Republican accusations of voter fraud only serve to deflect and distract from their own efforts to fraudulently swing elections.

Vote to certify it, Harris won fair and square.

The bipartisan state board of elections evidently thinks there is sufficient reason to delay certification.  They don't need to rush if there's something in question.  (You're getting really tiresome with this, btw.)

http://www.wfae.org/post/nc-elections-investigator-seized-absentee-ballots-bladen-county#stream/0

That's Florida politics in a nutshell.

I hope Harris loses, he’d be the second worst member of the house, only being beaten out by Steve King

I doubt, unless he literally hates freedom, would be worse than Gohmert.

The 2018 midterms are the elections that won't end.  :p

Are there enough votes in the precincts where the results look fudged that McCready could have won the election?

If it was a unanimous vote then it's clear that the board has a good reason to be concerned. An investigation seems warranted.

Looking at the vote totals from certain precincts in Bladen County, the only conclusion is that there was massive fraud.

It appears the North Carolina BOE is empowered to throw out the results of the election merely if doubt is cast upon the result; they don't actually have to demonstrate that fraud changed the result to call for a rerun.

This story is kind of personally amusing in that in my alt-1968 timeline (https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=296543.0), the election hinged on voter fraud by a county election official in North Carolina.  :)

What is strange to me is that on one hand, this seems like it should be a huge story on the face or it, and yet as far as I can tell it hasn't been picked up by any of the national media at all, nor have any of the leading house election analysts (Silver/Cohn/Wasserman) given any comment on it, suggesting this is just some technicality than can be safely ignored.

It is a weird discrepancy. I think they're waiting because NC said more info on Friday.

From an expert on NC election law:

https://twitter.com/gercohen/status/1067622645858996224

Even without any hard evidence, this seems like exactly the sort of thing Rachel Maddow would spend the first 50 minutes of her show teasing out all the rumors over.  But nope, tonight is yet another episode on Russian collusion, rehashing Senate committee testimony from last year.

I think it's quite reasonable that there hasn't been much media attention on this yet.  It may well turn out to be a nothingburger.  If something that was actually fishy comes to light, then the media will (justifiably) be all over it.

Vosem,

That's a very good question, and unfortunately NC is not as transparent in posting precinct level election results at a Statewide level.

So, in States or Counties where it is difficult to obtain public official election results, such as Bladen County NC, it becomes a bit more challenging....

I look the liberty of going to a site that collects precinct level data from official sources, that frequently has to rely on scanned PDFs from local County election offices and runs them through an OCR software program, and then dumps the raw output into a CSV file after some customized scripting programs... (PM me if you want a link to the source).

I basically looked at the following Four precincts in Bladen County for the 2016 NC GOV race for the two Major Party candidates only (Not LBT or Write-Ins).

Precinct 15= 516 Total Votes (DEM + REP)
Precinct 201= 243 Total Votes (DEM + REP)
Precinct 202= 430 Total Votes (DEM + REP)
Precinct 501= 426 Total Votes (DEM + REP)

*** Note with Precinct 501 there appears to be an anomaly which I would most likely chalk up to a scripting error that shows 501 is 268 DEM and 268 REP.

It also appears to duplicate Republican results for all precincts for Bladen County, but the other number for precinct 501 = 158 REP vs 268 REP.

So, let's assume for the sake of argument that the total '16 NC-GOV results for these four precincts (Excluding 3rd Party Candidates and Write-Ins) was 1,615 Total Votes (DEM + REP).

Now it starts to get tricky, since one of the focuses of the investigation was absentee ballot fraud....

Voters might be coded to a hard precinct for In-Person voting, but the County wraps up One-Stop Precincts into several different buckets, as well as Mail-In-Absentee Ballots....

How to divide items such as the early "One Stop Vote Centers" into precincts, and how to assess absentee ballots starts to get a bit thorny, especially since I don't visibility on the EV In-Person Vote Center total numbers or ABS for the portion of the CD within the County....

This is one of the frustrating things about many states (Not just Southern States) that take entire buckets of EVs and ABS-Mail Voters and don't move these numbers back to the precinct in a transparent fashion....

Also, I couldn't even find a means to pull up a precinct map of the County to see if maybe there was some major precinct shifts that might have contributed to this, etc....

Ironically, the official County Election Site has a major warning on their official site posted 7/13/18 notifying residents that they are taking all steps to protect election security after the indictment of Russian Military Intelligence Officials because of election hacking/fraud attempts (Meddling I think it is politely called).

https://bladennc.govoffice3.com/?SEC=1B08DD3E-D802-4B15-9D99-CCCA341FAD38

So take that fwiw, but that's the data I could quickly pull up about these precinct #s in 30-40 Minutes of my time....

If McCready was in the lead, the left would be up in arms by now.

Yep, that's why no one watches MSNBC anymore.

Bladen County had some bizarre irregularities in favor of Harris during the primary too (such as more absentees cast there than the entire rest if the district.) It's entirely possible that that Harris stole the nomination from Pittenger as well.

And the right would be screaming voter fraud. What's your point?

Unlike the Extreme Right, the Extreme Left over the past Four Decades, does not engage in political violence targeting individuals...

The Extreme Right is heavily driven by Neo-Fascist and White Supremacist political formations that have been on our watch list for decades.

The "Lone Wolves" of the Extreme Right have been steered and guided by the same movement leaders that have been around for decades, and most of the political violence and mass murders by extremists have been committed by these same folks....

Meanwhile the "Extreme Left" gave up the Armed Struggle decades ago, and now we see overwhelmingly peaceful protests, with occasional incidents where various political formations occasionally commit minor violence against property and once in awhile in the "Left-Wing" strongholds of the US occasionally a few rocks are thrown against law enforcement officers, that are also from overwhelmingly Democratic communities....

Now, in a text based format it's extremely easy to sound too serious on my point, compared to what you were likely actually attempting to say....

"Up in Arms" is a rhetorical presentation on your part, rather than an actual statement regarding Political Violence in the United States in 2018 (Or even within the past 40 Years).

Does "Up in Arms" mean how Republicans in Miami-Dade County since 2000 to the present day have attempted to intimidate local election officials to get the results they want, using everything from storming County Election Offices in 2000 to blockading County Election offices using a fleet of Rental Trucks after the 2018 election?

Democrats tend to be to easy to lie down, roll over, and take the results where it really hurts, and not challenge results that might be extremely sketchy such as TX-23.

Every vote counts, but the PUBs in certain parts of the Country tend to dominate the Counties where the votes are actually cast, dictate the rules of the game, shift around precincts, voting hours, and intentionally try to maintain power politics, even in places with history of White Supremacist rule, where in theory the VRA was supposed to solve all of those issues.....

Is it any wonder that some backwoods County in NC has been rigging the game for Decades, but maybe they got caught because some PUB CI has been cooperating on these issues, because their relative lost re-election for County Dogcatcher?

So ok--- hyperbole aside, have you had a chance to check out the precinct results yet, and can you contribute the communities impacted, or break down how they assign EV locations and break down ABS numbers by precinct?

Sorry--- Western US doesn't like election cheating, regardless of the most heavily Republican State to the most heavily Democratic State....

Looking forward to actually seeing the final results in a potential recount / rerun once the Bi-Partisan officials of the NC-BoE start shifting through this data in greater detail.

Here's the results in the primary from Bladen County, LOL.

()

If its determined that Harris stole the primary then that's enough to invalidate the election and call a special.

ok yeah I can understand weird voting habits in a county between two different parties but yeah that primary is super suspicious. But then wouldn't Pittenger probably win the primary  as Harris would be scandal plagued? That would make it tougher for mcready to win.

In my opinion (and I know I'm biased), NC has some of the easiest accessed voter information there is. It might be a little slow to certify but it is incredibly easy to access with an interactive map. You are correct in saying that occasionally they do not split the early vote into the precincts, but I have it on very good authority that they will for this election (they did so in the primary as well).

https://er.ncsbe.gov/contest_details.html?election_dt=11/06/2018&county_id=9&contest_id=1183*

*As of right now, the absentee, one stop, and provisional ballots have yet to be broken down by precinct, however, they should be at some point in the future.

Also, it's easy to pull the registered voter list as well as the 2018 general voter file from the state's SOS page. I can't find it off hand, but if that's something y'all would like to look at I can put in some time pulling out information on Bladen County.

Pittenger is a terrible politician; uncharismatic, uninspiring, corrupt, etc. There's a reason why the primary was so close even if Harris went over the top due to fraud

ahaa. Called it:

https://twitter.com/CraigJ_NandO/status/1068157984906387456

Luckily the State Supreme Court will smack them back down. It's almost comical at this point.

So, looks like Harris leads by 832 votes in Bladen (and district-wide by 905). If there's a reasonable belief some shenanigans occurred here - to the extent that it's equivalent to roughly 1 in 5 GOP ballots cast in the county - then this would be the biggest instance of voter fraud in a long time.

The Charlotte Observer story (https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/election/article222263905.html) says that Harris leads by 1557 in Bladen.

I must have not done the math properly: I handcounted using this link (https://er.ncsbe.gov/contest_details.html?election_dt=11/06/2018&county_id=9&contest_id=1183) from the State Board of Elections (though it shows countywide the same lead you mentioned).

Aaah, OK: early and absentee are in their own countywide category, and thus don't show on the precinct map totals. So Harris led by 832 votes from Election Day voting out of 4276 votes cast, and an additional 729-vote lead from early, absentee and provisional voting out of 5122 votes cast.

Didn’t they say we would get more details on what they’re looking at today? Has a time been posted anywhere?

I thought it was going to be Friday (but don't have a citation for that).

Waiting for someone to come up with an innocent explanation of this.  (* settles down with a good book *)

When Republicans do it, it's not voter fraud.

I don't believe that actually happened.

Can the democrats please stop trying to steal elections?

It's a bipartisan board voting unanimously. If it was a 5 to 4 decision I would be outraged too but a unanimous decision suggests maybe there is a problem

I'm confused. It's the Republican Party that keeps saying that voter fraud is an epidemic, so when a bipartisan board unanimously holds back certification and suspects mischief, you accuse Democrats of shenanigans?

This is a parody account, right?

It’s astonishing how much mental gymnastics people will do to convince themselves that the majority of the public is on the same side as them

More info from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:


Link to Michael Bitzer's detailed analysis (http://www.oldnorthstatepolitics.com/2018/11/ncs-closest-congressional-contest-gets.html)

You're talking to an ignorant hack who until recently had a Hitler quote in his signature.

Honestly, the only worst hacks on this forum who exercise even worse judgement... Would be of course the moderators who let him stay after he did so.

And the people of the 9th chose Harris.

The NCGOP further proving how evil they are.

That has not yet been officially established, and your repeated assertions will not make it so.  If the BoE upholds Harris's election, then feel free to gloat at that point; but unless and until that happens, will you PLEASE knock it off?  You have enough of value to say on other topics that I would regret putting you on Ignore, but I'm about 1 millimeter from it at this point.

Why do people even reply to Bagel

I mean, this is one of those cases where, if allegations turn out to be sufficiently established to order a new election (which would seem to be the only reasonable remedy at this point), somebody better go to prison. Because the allegations are those of very serious electoral fraud, and it will not be sufficient to leave them underinvestigated. I mean, I generally agree that only very serious and proven misconduct should be grounds for annulling electoral results at this stage.  The allegations, clearly, raise to the former standard - but I want to see them proven in court.

Those tweets indicate that a woman is already being identified in photographs. So yeah they got a suspect. Of course she's probably just small time and should plead to turn in the real villains.

Somebody is going to be brought up on felony charges because what is stated in those affidavits is serious. After all the bogus Republican claims of fraud in California it's almost funny that an actual case of fraud seems to have been orchestrated by a Republican. Now when Republicans claim fraud Democrats have the receipts.

Knowing how the last few years have gone, it will eventually come out that every senior Republican official in the country and their mother has met with this woman at some point or another, that she has received secret payments for thousands of dollars, and had a backdoor liaison at the Russian Embassy.

Lets wait before calling it GOP voter fraud. It does seem to look like it but can we all just wait?

Given that is sounds like the alleged fraud may have targeted both the incumbent Republican and the Democratic challenger, this may be a highly unusual circumstance (at least in this political environment) where we actually see a reasonably bipartisan investigation.

Thanks for the update, since honestly I've had extreme difficulty trying to track down a comprehensive NC Statewide Site that allows visibility to precinct level data in all parts of the State....

Gave you credit on the following thread where I've been trying to make precinct level data more accessible to both Atlas members and non-registered visitors to the Site....

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=307483.msg6549215#msg6549215

This is disgusting.

Lock these Bladen GOP fraudsters up ... for years.

Invalidate the election and call a new one.

It's gonna turn out to be this lady.

() (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina)

Or maybe this one.

() (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chapman)

Seriously, the guy is either trolling or has reading comprehension issues.

Fine, fine. I will be back here to remind you once Harris has a 100% chance of winning (it's like 99% if not more now).

Yeah, I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole but this does look SUPER suspect. There's no way every single county moved *somewhat* to the Dems, yet that one county did not move an inch.

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1068338084394090498

Yeah. Someone should be getting soap on a rope for Christmas  . The NC GOP are such crooks!

These disingenuous posts, with their repetition, are crossing the line into trolling. I suggest you reconsider.

If people see trolling behavior on these threads, please report to the mods.

Since when is stating a fact trolling. Even if you invalidate every single absentee ballot from Bladen County Harris still wins. The people of the ninth clearly chose Harris lol, that’s not trolling.

Of course, this should still be investigated and if someone committed fraud they should be thrown in jail. But the county is just too small to have had an impact on this race’s outcome.

Not true in the primary. Harris may not even be a legitimate nominee.

The primary was decided by 800 votes. Again, if you entirely invalidate the votes they are investigating Harris still would’ve won. It’s just simple math.

It has also been claimed in one article that the absentee ballot harvesting operation may have simply destroyed many ballots that were cast for McCready (don't have the citation handy, sorry).  There is no way to adjust for this.  If these allegations of massive ballot harvesting do pan out, this election is hopelessly tainted, and the only fair course of action is to call a new election, hopefully with tighter controls.  If Harris wins that, I will be the first to say he is the rightful Representative for this district.

Go to:

NC State Board of Election (https://www.ncsbe.gov/index.html)

Click on 2018 Election Results in Lower Middle.
Select the election of interest: 11/8/2016 and Office: Council of State.

Then click on Display Large Map at lower left, then click on Bladen County, and then under Governor's race, click on Display Vote Details. You can just scroll over the precincts or select Display by Precinct.

Four of the anomalous precincts for 2018 are on the western edge of the county. P30 in the southeast is also anomalous, but it is in the other CD.

You want P60 instead of P201.

There are results for both CD's for P25. So perhaps even if a district splits a precinct, they simply provide different ballot styles. The Bladen precincts appear to match the townships.

There was an effort to not split precincts in the re-redistricting, since that was used as an indicia of racial gerrymandering.

The precinct results do not include the early voting in-person or by-mail. Since more than half the votes were cast early, this is a problem. The official canvass may include this information.

There was only one early voting location, at Elizabethtown, the county seat. It is about 15 miles from places like Bladenboro or Tar Heel. A 40-minute round trip might be OK to vote for president, senator, and governor, but less so when the top race is a congressional race where you are a rural county on the extreme end of the district away from Charlotte.

***OK I found it. In 2016 there were four early voting locations, including ones in Bladenboro, Dublin, and East Arcadia. The one in Bladenboro was 74% for Burr(R), The one in Dublin was 67% for Burr, and the one in East Arcadia was 9% for Burr.

Election day voting was up in all these areas relative to 2016 (P60 North of Dublin), P15 (Dublin), P202 (Bladenboro), P201 (Bladenboro), and P30 (East Arcadia)). That is, the absence of local early voting, pushed voters into election day voting and perhaps vote-by-mail.

In 2016, election-day turnout was down in most of those precincts, even though more votes overall were cast. This means they likely shifted to early voting when there were convenient early voting sites. 2016 election day turnout was also down in P501 and P502 (both in Elizabethtown). But it did not rebound in 2018, likely because there continued to be convenient in-town early voting.

When it’s false AND it’s posted disingenuously ignoring the facts posted and quoted AND it’s posted multiple times in a row. That’s when it crosses the line into trolling. Bagel knows what he’s doing.

Likely has something to do with the early voting location in Bladenboro being closed in 2018.

In 2016 early voting at that location was 74% for Burr(R) in the US Senate race.

I would be fascinated if your reporter, would mention that.

That's not how math works my friend.  Sure, if you don't count the votes from that county the Republican may be winning, but what if the Democrat won more votes than the Republican in that county?  So invalidating votes from the county isn't a fair solution.

It is literally impossible for the Democrat to have won enough votes in the absentee vote in that county to have won the election. The Democrat would’ve had to win 300% as many votes as there were total absentees to win the election. That is how math works.

Like Nate Silver said, "yeah, there was rampant election fraud but it didn't determine the winner" isn't exactly a winning argument.

Oh, stop being disingenuous.  You're completely ignoring the possibilty (which has been alleged in at least one article) that the absentee harvesters -- an illegal practice in NC -- destroyed ballots marked for McCready.  There's obviously no way to know how many such (if any) were destroyed, so the whole concept of trying to adjust the absentee numbers is ludicrous.  If the absentee harvesting is substantiated, the election needs to be thrown out.  And the perpetrators thrown into jail.

I think this situation was actually mentioned as part of the reason why they can call a new election - because regardless if the actual fraudulent votes discovered are enough to flip the result, it creates enough doubt in the result that a new one must be held, given that election results must be trusted to some degree.

Point being that if there were hundreds of fraudulent votes cast in an organized scheme to change the result, there could be more votes they didn't find or other legitimate votes destroyed. So whether or not the votes discovered can change the results is irrelevant.

When the Republican majority On The Board of Elections unanimously refuse to certify the elections based on obvious fraud that would have in their opinion changed the results, the extreme, and I mean extreme, statistical anomalies of several Bladen County precincts going for Harris, the rather obvious TwoPlusTwo conclusion to be drawn from the similar facts in these various affidavits, the individual identified in these photographs being referred to as a republican operative, for gosh sakes why?

There's jumping to conclusions, and then there's reaching a reasonable conclusion based on the facts. This is clearly the ladder. The only issue here is whether or not it is determined to be sufficient enough to Warrant ordering a new election. However, Mason the extremely close nature of his election and the numbers of most this appears to have changed, I can only see one realistic remedy here.

Its also possible the Democratic House just refuses to seat Harris and calls for special election.

absolutely disgusting
Let this bipartisan board do it together. If scotus rules that the board is unconstitutional but the board says for SE id be fine them refusing to seat Harris but the house should not be able to do this.

I mean there are instances where the House refusing to seat someone would be legitimate, such as where the state refuses to investigate and take action on rather blatant fraud. Not that North Carolina is an instance of this (so far, though case looks strong), but the House being able to refuse to seat is a good backstop in a country where states hold a lot of power over elections to Congress.

Also, if the NCGOP tries to short-circuit this investigation in any way, then yes, it would make sense to refuse to seat him. I think the state party is already suing to force them to certify it, so that is one step towards trying to sweep this under the rug.

-

Overall I think it wouldn't be wise to refuse to seat Harris though, unless it becomes clear that there are more fraudulent votes for him that put him over the top. Democrats have to remember that just because you can do something, does not mean you should. It's also something I really wish Republicans would learn as well (no hope there tho). Otherwise, it'd be better to just dismantle the group responsible for these fraudulent ballots and put them in prison, along with anyone who supported them.

Madam Speaker Pelosi must take a stand and refuse to seat Harris under any condition. 

Here's more on the allegations:

The bipartisan board is already left leaning with the indie . The board should have the final decision unless it's obvious

I'm not the one to normally defend MUH NORMS but the House refusing to seat a Congressman whose election has been duly certified would be a terrible precedent that Republicans would probably run with, with disastrous consequences.

I certainly think this situation is incredibly suspect and needs a thorough investigation, maybe even a whole new election. Still, though, I can't condone refusing to seat him if everything somehow comes up clean.

Oh for Pete's sake...

"Left leaning"?!? The board voted unanimously, repeat unanimously, including every single Republican on the board, not to certify the election due to blatant fraud.

What is with you? You've rarely been so hackish to my recollection.

I was just trolling tbh

I don't have a problem with the board atm but from my research the indie is left leaning I saw somewhere on tiwtter. Anyway I will continue to trust the board as long as the decisions are 6-3 or higher. I am just against the idea of the house deciding this election unless it's user obvious

Agreed 101%. However, there's a lot of information available about this situation, and based on what it is there's only three possible outcomes.

1. This turned out to be a whole big misunderstanding with Miss stated evidence and something everyone will just laugh and get it over with. Chances of this realistically, less than 5% at best. Seriously, if it was enough to get the Republicans on an election board in a hyper-partisan state like North Carolina with the most partisan GOP organization in the country to unanimously vote that there were serious Shenanigans going on, you can count on it.

Two. A full and impartial investigation is done and, if even a fraction of these allegations turn out to be well-founded, a new election needs to be ordered. If so, Harris is hopefully, and justifiably screwed, even in a special election.

Three. The North Carolina GOP acts according to character, or lack thereof, and does everything in anything humanly possible to support and certify the voter fraud that they so passionately oppose when it comes to creating legal blocks that make it tougher for people to vote, ever so coincidentally particularly burning the poor and people of color, in which case Pelosi needs to stand firm and refused to certify Harris. Hell, depending on the outcome the investigation they may very well go ahead and certify McCready, again if even half of these allegations proof true. This was a close election and with widespread extreme voter fraud.

Under situation two or three, two things are apparent. First, one or more people need to do prison time. Secondly, like with most things, Republican allegations of voter fraud are mostly a combination of an argument necessary to convince themselves and look themselves in the mirror and maintain any Pride over voter suppression to retain power, and an equal part pure projection.

As of right now Id say is a 70 percent chance of fraud happening . 40 60 the fraud affects the margin mathematically and about 25 percent that Harris is involved

I would also be inclined to go with whatever the board rules.  The House intervening to seat one of the candidates can lead to a result that's possibly unjust (see the 1984 IN-08 House election (https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal85-1146635)).  The most I would want to see them do (and that only if the result from the state is truly unclear) is declare the seat vacant and leave it to the state to hold a new election, as was done in the 1974 NH Senate race (https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Closest_election_in_Senate_history.htm).  The second election in NH was decided by a wide margin.

Mind you if its determined that Harris was involved in fraud but that it wasn't enough to affect the outcome the latter part is irrelevant-Harris should be going to jail, not Congress. The candidate going to jail seems like a valid reason to not seat him.

IMHO, that 70% figure is extremely low based on what we know that's far. It would take an absolute sea change in the facts to be otherwise.

It is almost impossible to come up with a quantitative figures to How likely it would have reversed the margin. Again, the reports indicate writable evidence of actual vote shredding. However, the numbers of day of absentee balloting end the Republican friendly Natura of them was enormous, and probably without even a single shredded Democratic ballot, not to mention how many ballots that were collected from McCready voters in filled out for Harris as the affidavits repeatedly indicate, it would have alone likely flip the election. But again, the only thing one can say is a considerable number of ballots work Forge, and an unknown number destroyed in an ultra close election. I think you're just projecting here and trying to say it doesn't matter.

Third, if you are saying a 25% chance that Harris personally new about these efforts, as opposed to members of his campaign which it appears near certain? Yeah, I'll say that there's at least a 25% chance of that.

OK 80 percent but anyway Im not sure Harris is personally involved and we could give him the benefit of the doubt for now

Well I was speaking more generally about the fundamental authority to seat or not seat a Rep-elect whose win is tainted.

But in NC's case, there are a couple issues:

1. The actual structure of the elections board is due to revert back to its old form before this ordeal is over, with the Governor's party holding a majority of seats, because one of the many attempts the NCGOP has made to change the structure to benefit their party was ruled unconstitutional. This is why Harris's campaign is asking the court to stay that decision until after this is resolved.

2. The NCGOP has never been shy about flexing its legislative muscle to rush through rule changes or other schemes to benefit themselves when they feel they might lose an election, or when they have lost but want to nullify the results as much as possible. They called a special session earlier this year just to strip the GOP party registration of the spoiler candidate in the state supreme race (I think they also made other small changes to the rules to benefit their candidate). I'm not convinced they won't try to change the rules of the election board before this is over in order to prevent a new election.

They already have a special session about to start (or has started already) and rumors are that they are attempting to change the election boards again as a 4th attempt to either seize control entirely or make the board so dysfunctional that neither party can do anything.

Situations like this should make it clear why they are so desperate to maintain control of the election + ethics boards.

^^ Also worth keeping in mind that there seem to be a number of cases where they took ballots from who were probably Democrats, and presumably changed them to Harris or never submitted the ballots. Turning McCready votes into Harris votes is worse than just adding a Harris vote. Further, who knows how many absentee ballots for McCready were never turned in that would have otherwise been so.

The damage from this could definitely have flipped the result if what has been alleged in affidavits is true and more widespread. This is why a new election is a reasonable option even if the # of fraudulent votes does not surpass Harris's winning margin. No clue how many McCready votes were changed or destroyed outright.

FF joe Bruno for doing all this reporting.

Stickied thread, yay!

Anyway, I think that new elections are the most likely outcome. This is serious fraud and too blatant to ignore, and the NCSBOE seems to know who they are investigating, in specific.

Yeah now im pretty certain there was fraud but now there are two questions

Did the fraud affect the final outcome in this election or the primary.
If not did Mark Harris himself have direction knowledge about this fraud. I would there there is a 50/50 of either or both of these happening and in that scenario I would say there a 90% chance we get a new election,8% chance that Harris is declared the winner and 2% that Mcready is outright declared the winner.

Also harris twitter account had a direct tweet

https://twitter.com/MarkHarrisNC9/status/1068631295218073600

The AP has withdrawn its call of this race.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-the-heck-is-happening-in-that-north-carolina-house-race/

538 article of the entire situation.

One of the interesting tidbits in this (which I was unaware of previously) is that the questions aren't limited to Bladen County.  Robeson also looks somewhat suspicious.

So the question is, was the Republican candidate somehow aware of (or even involved in) the fraud?  The fact that there is evidence of fraud in the Republican primary as well, makes me suspect there is a good chance he is somehow involved.  I would like to have some more concrete evidence, but this seems to be a case where legal action is necessary. 

I also wonder how often things like this happen in elections in general.

although the NC GOP is a complete sh**t show and I don't trust them I really wish the board was a bit more open about the situation. Most of the info we know is from journalists going directly to the county.

Is there any chance that the primary will be redone as well? The 538 article seems to indicate that the anomalies were present but smaller there (not enough to chance the result). Also, the fact that this suspicious activity seems to stretch back through previous election years makes me think that the Harris team did not know about the fraud (at least at its onset, they may have learned later).

Honestly, it seems kind of irrelevant at this point if the fraud changed the outcome of the election. If there was even an ounce of fraud, ballot switching, vote totals changing, etc., then the entire election should be null and void.

North Carolina: the other Florida.

This is actually worse than Florida. North Carolina Republicans have gone out of their way to control the state government through gerrymandering, stripping the governor of powers, rearranging Supreme Court elections. The next step was to outright cheat.

Florida was more the dems fault and a bit of worried republicans. Honestly the fact Gillum unconceded was not very classy when no recount overturns a 50k margin.
However as NC 9th I am growing more confident that atleast something happened on the county level.

Not quite. Florida fails out of pure incompetence. North Carolina always fails because the NCGOP is cartoonishly evil.

Tbf the gerrymander was an own goal by the NC dems. They repealed the governor veto. If they didn't Dole would have been able to veto it.

They note the 2016 election, but omit some important details.

In 2016, the allegations were that  the Bladen Improvement Political Action Committee, whose leader was Horace Munn had harvested votes, including writing in the name of a write-in candidate for a non-partisan election for a conservation district. The write-in votes appeared to use similar handwriting. Munn said at the time that they had been informed that they should have signed the ballots as giving assistance, even though they didn't (according to Munn) provide assistance in filling out the bubbles.

Horace Munn, is incidentally a Black Democrat, and his organization received funding from the Democratic Party as a GOTV effort.

Munn may be related to county commissioner Ophelia Munn-Goins who is a Black Democrat.

So a volunteer goes to door of some voter who is harassed and intimidated at the polls, in the 75% Democratic-registration county. The volunteer is working for a Democrat-funded group headed by a Black Democrat who may be related to a Black Democratic county commissioner.

"Mrs. Johnson, I'm here to help you with your ballot. I've brought a sample ballot so you know how to vote. Be sure to write in Franklin Graham. You don't know how to write in, or maybe are afraid the Klan will recognize your printing? I suppose I can help you with that. Is your lumbago acting up, and need help with some bubbles. You're right, it was better when we used X's. I don't know why they changed. You say I know how you vote. I guess I do (chuckle). Straight-ticket Democrat. There, I'm finished. I'll seal up the envelope and you can sign the envelope. I'll make sure this gets to the election folks. If I bring enough in, I'll get some scholarship money."

So a dedicated young Democratic runner who is just trying to make some money to pay for college, helps an elderly widow or couple, and goes a little bit extra by filling out the ballot, but never actually telling them how to vote beyond providing a sample ballot for them to copy, may have inadvertently committed an election offense.

Also in 2016, it was reported that Michael Cogdell had taken pictures inside the early voting site, apparently using the motion recording option. Cogdell is a county commissioner, and incidentally a Black Democrat, took his phone outside and showed the pictures to Horace Dunn (see above) and a news reporter.

There was a second election complaint in Bladen County. Kenneth Register (D) lost a district race for commissioner to a Republican. This may be the first election in the 21st, 20th, or late 19th century where a Republican had won a commissioner district in Bladen County.

Three at large seats are elected by limited voting. At the time of the 2016 primary it was noted that the Democrats had chosen their two commissioners. But at the general election Republicans won two seats, because 54% of the votes for a Democrat, were for Cogdell, while the remainder were split between two candidates. The Republicans ran two candidates and they finished 2nd and 3rd.

Register's complaint said that there had been tampering with memory sticks and also irregularities in absentee voting. Register had been nominated in the Democratic primary, defeating an incumbent Democrat by a 19 vote margin, 948:929, which was one vote outside the 1% margin needed for a recount. Register had received 93.1% of the absentee ballots, while receiving 45.3% of the in-person voting. Register was said to be supported by the Bladen Improvement Political Action Committee (see above) and two witnesses on his complaint were Michael Cogdell and Horace Munn (see above and above). Register received 65% of the absentee votes in the general election, vs. 44.3% of the in-person votes.

An affidavit from one woman said that an individual had told her that he could get some money for getting so many absentee ballots. She liked to help young people out, so she requested a ballot for herself, her forty-year-old daughter, and twin 20-year-old sons. Her daughter was not eligible for an absentee ballot because she didn't live in North Carolina, but she received three ballots. Presumably, her daughter also did not live in the same house, and perhaps had not for close to two decades. The young person persisted in coming back to collect the ballots, but she had not have a chance to fill out the ballots (plural, sic). I don't know why it never occurred to her to let her two sons fill out their own ballots.

At the hearing before the Bladen County Board of Elections, the board ruled that there was not probable cause for the alleged tampering with the memory sticks. Register replied that it was not alleged tampering, he had witnessed it himself. The board also said they could not review the allegations about absentee voting because the state board had taken jurisdiction because of the allegations in the other case.

So move forward to 2018, and the state board seizes the applications for absentee ballots the day after the election, probably before it was clear that the congressional race would be close. A Democratic member from the state board from neighboring Robeson County admits "sadly" there is a history of vote harvesting in his part of the state. Rest assured, it wasn't the Republicans who had been doing the harvesting in an extremely Democratic Party of the state. There has always been a Republican presence in the western part of the state since the Civil War, and this gradually spread to the cities (Wake voted for Ford in 1976, and Mecklenburg was only narrowly carried by Carter, but the rural eastern part of the state has been a holdout.

The only Republicans to carry Bladen County were Hoover in 1928 (Smith was Catholic and a wet); Nixon in 1972 (McGovern was a peacenik ultraliberal); Bush in 2004 (by 65 votes); and Trump in 2016. BTW, Wallace had a plurality in 1968.

The bipartisan state board unanimously voted to withhold certification of the congressional race because of

(1) Even the Republicans were embarrassed by the shenanigans in Bladen County. The Democrats gleefully went along.

or

(2) The Republicans wanted to complete the investigation so that they could embarrass Roy Cooper. The Democrats couldn't afford to quash the investigation - so they got a fig leaf of not certifying the results.

404= Fake News

There's obviously some shifty and shady stuff going on here....

Some 30 Years back I read a book from Loompanics (Libertarian-Socialist Publisher outside of Port Townsend Washington).... called "How to Steal an Election" (or something similar).

My recollection is that the tactics used were based upon real-life techniques that the Richard Nixon campaign had used in '68 and perhaps more importantly in '72.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate the title yet, since Loompanics faced a full frontal Federal assault between '81 and '95 designed to destroy this small Independent Libertarian Publishing House...

https://www.governmentattic.org/4docs/FBI-Loompanics_1981-1995.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loompanics

This caused most of their former titles to go out of circulation and left a "rump publishing house" reduced to carrying a small sliver of their former titles, after all of the legal fees involved.

http://www.earthlightbooks.com/ci_2480.html

What is left even on places like Amazon are titles that heavily focus on Guns, and a few other items and very few of their older titles.

3_10?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=loompanics+unlimited&sprefix=loompanics%2Caps%2C219&crid=3711M6LJM6FCW&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aloompanics+unlimited

The point is that this style of election stealing is so extremely blatant and egregious to the point where the Nixon Administration "Old Skool" tactics appear to be such, where the local 'Pubs got caught "with their hands in the cookie jar"....

Let's wait to see the results of the official inquiries, but looks like something that has been going on for decades, and now the cheaters might have finally gotten caught.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/606/just-what-i-wanted/act-two-0

From two years ago. Zoe Chace of TAL goes to Bladen County, NC to investigate GOP claims of Dem absentee voter fraud there.

I really want TAL to send her back down there to do the exact reverse story.

Can someone provide the Cliffs Notes version of jim's post? It looks like the explanation for fraud that caused incredible and atypical Republican results is "Democrats did something bad" but that is so confusing that I won't believe it.

Pretty much.   A black Democrat goes door to door with sample ballots, take the people's ballots to the poll.   Democrats have been harvesting votes for decades, Republicans never do anything wrong....yadda yadda yadda.

Thank you for summarizing.

.

If this does go to another election, what is the precedent? When would it be and would there be another primary?

The title needs to be changed to 7-2 refuses to certify

NH senate 1974 was within 10 votes  so they had a special election

btw whats everyone opinion on California's ballot harvesting. No I am not using whataboutism as this would be comparing legalized prostitution to illegal prostitution as in California it is legal.

Does anyone else feel like that should be illegal in California?

The campaigns I've worked with collected a few ballots along the way. Nothing wrong with that as long as it's done by people who actually have an interest in making the vote count and not the opposite.

If California vote by mail ballots can be returned by anyone authorized to do so by the voter. Democrats do this with people who actually are on their voting lists, not random people and they certainly aren't out stealing the ballots of Republicans who aren't voting for Democratic candidates.

It's a literal criminal investigation at this point. How transparent should it be?

One reason this is such an issue... is not only did Harris win the general by less than 1000 votes... he won the Primary by 850 votes [and Harris had close to 900 more absentee votes than Pittenger (the incumbent) in Bladen Co.]

Also- the person supposedly at the center of the vote shenanigans... worked for a different candidate in 2016.  That candidate finished 3rd in the 2016 primary... yet overwhelmingly won the absentee vote in Bladen Co.

So the issue is as much about the Primary as it is the general... equally so.

Supposedly the numbers (to a lesser extent) in neighboring Robeson Co were also affected... but for various reasons its harder to prove statistically.

This was the case in 2016 imo... when the person at the center of the scandal (now and in 2016) ... was the one alleging absentee voting fraud against the Dems on behalf of McCroy (the R Governor who barely lost re-election).  So you had the person that it appears was likely committing the Fraud against Dems.... accusing Dems of committing that exact same Fraud. (This was when McCrory was trying everything to hold on to the Governorship).     ...Now, whether or not McCroy actually knew what was going on--- I have no idea.  But at the very least he had no problems of accusing Dems of something he had no proof of- or even a reason to suspect such).

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article222495590.html

“RALEIGH
The chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections has resigned, Gov. Roy Cooper’s spokesperson confirmed Saturday.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that Andy Penry had stepped down as leader of the nine-person board, saying “he did not want his partisan views to undermine a widening investigation into alleged election fraud in the 9th Congressional District race.”

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article222495590.html#storylink=cpy

FFS

What's the procedure to replace him?

True. And to North Carolina's credit, they managed to at least elect a Democratic Governor.

Cooper appoints someone.

Oh.

::)

That put was regarding holding a hearing by a certain date. The vote not to certify was in fact nine to nothing.

Oh, OK, good.

So more likely than not, a Democrat gets this seat.

A special election is Tilt r imo. It resembles ohio 12th overall

A special election would require another primary. If I had to guess, there’s no way Harris is winning that even with the odds stacked in his favor. We could see Pittenger run again, and win the special primary and election.

Pittenger v harris is anyway like mini moore and strange. Both are weak candidates. Its just that Pittenger looks better so everyone he's a strong candidate.

Can the board order a new primary, or just a general election?  The primary result was previously certified.  (To be clear, I think they should start over with a new primary, since it looks tainted as well.)

Here’s where I’m having trouble with the math: is this about the high number of ballots FOR Harris or is it also about the number of ballots requested but not turned in? Were ballots being changed, collected and not turned in, or both? If ballots were collected but not turned in, it means we can’t only look at the numbers FOR Harris to determine if fraud took place but also consider that votes were destroyed which broadens the possibilities it could have impacted the numbers. And if a Harris vote was changed to a Dem vote, that changes the margin by 2, right?

Do the completed absentee ballots show who they belong to? Does it only depend on a legible signature? What do we think investigators will do? Contact each absentee voter to see if A. They turned one in B. How they turned one in. C. If it still reflects how they voted (was it altered?)

It's suspected that the Harris campaign may have both illegally filled out absentee ballots AND destroyed absentee ballots for McCready. I assume they will be speaking with individual absentee voters, because there are affidavits from voters that the Harris campaign took their absentee ballots.

AFAIK there is no way to determine a ballot was returned by a specific voter, which makes C moot.

Makes sense. I know one of the affidavits talked about it not being signed so wasn’t sure how identifiable it was.

It would *seem* that in Bladen, due to the lower return rate for Republicans, it’s less likely Dem ballots were destroyed, which would inflate Republican turnout. Whereas Robeson is the opposite, with high Republican return numbers and a high rate of ballots not returned overall. So either ballots were destroyed or they planned to work Robeson the same way they did Bladen, and got lots of requests for ballots in, but didn’t follow through as much collecting them.

Though it would seem they have to know who a mail in ballot is coming in from as they keep records of who votes. Maybe it’s on the envelope outside and not identifiable where the votes/choices are made, but for verification purposes, it would have to be somewhere. So they should be able to ask those who requested if they returned, just not if it has been altered.

I'm sure it's a total coincidence.

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I consider myself vehemently pro-voter in terms of restrictions vs access, and I'm not sure I agree that campaign workers and other paid individuals should be able to take ballots and return them. I feel like there is too much room for abuse, and California's elections have become so voter-friendly that it is hard to argue that this is needed.

I want to try and strike a balance between voter-friendly policy and a free-for-all that results in some high-profile incident that the right never stops using against Democrats as a way to delegitimize an election. With trust in our institutions constantly declining, the last thing we need is more reasons for people to lose faith in our elections.

OTOH, "ballot harvesting" is not even legal in North Carolina and it still happened, so whether its' technically legal or not may not be that important when it comes to fraud.

I think I can mostly agree with what you said. I mean I just find the idea in California bad but it's still legal but in carolina it's illegal so if they can prove it happened with either Harris having knowledge or if the harvested ballots were destroyed a new election should be called

Mind you what's being described as happening here would be illegal even in California.

Anyway maybe there could be some restrictions on it in California at the very least? Perhaps you have to register as a harvest or ? Would anyone support that ?

No, mail it in or take it in. No one should be handling them other than Election officials and they shouldn’t be going to peoples houses to get them. There are restrictions; they were violated here resulting in a fraud investigation.

We're talking about hypothetical for states where it is legal for people to pick up ballots and deliver them for others.

Gotcha, this is what threw me off, or what I was reacting to in what you bolded.

https://popular.info/p/man-at-center-of-north-carolina-election


There’s more, too...

I really want to hear Kris Kobach's response to all this voter fraud.

Well if he's like every other Republican, the only answer is to slash early voting and make it harder to register to vote, regardless if the fraud in question had anything to do with it.

If no one can vote, there won't be any more fraud!

In 2018, the Republican candidate for Congress in Bladen County got 60% of the votes on election day. He received 61% of the absentee ballots

In Anson County, the election day race was about 50-50. The Democratic candidate got about 75% of the absentee vote.

Which is more atypical?

Here is the story from 2016.

Protest filed in Bladen County over alleged fraudulent absentee ballots (https://www.cbs17.com/news/protest-filed-in-bladen-county-over-alleged-fraudulent-absentee-ballots/1016974267)

There was an unopposed candidate for a non-partisan office in Bladen County. There was a write-in challenger. As a election clerk was going through the ballots he noticed the similarity in hand-writing of "Franklin Graham", the candidate favored by the Bladen County Improvement PAC, an organization that is funded by the Democratic Party and some Democratic candidates. For example, in 2016, Ken Spaulding, Roy Cooper's opponent in the Democratic Primary, contributed to the PAC, and Bladen County was his best county in the state. Statewide, Cooper had about 2/3 of the vote, but 2/3 of the vote in Bladen County.

This is even more pronounced for absentee ballots. In the 2016 primary:

President: Hillary Clinton 54% statewide, 83% absentee in Bladen.
US Senator: Chris Rey 17% statewide, 84% absentee Bladen.
Governor: Ken Spaulding 31% statewide, 74% absentee Bladen.
Lieutenant Governor: Robert Earl Wilson 11% statewide, 77% absentee Bladen.
Attorney General: Marcus Wilson 47% statewide , 90% absentee Bladen.
Commissioner of Labor: Charles Meeker 57% statewide, 90% absentee Bladen.
Superintendent of Public Instruction: June Atkinson 85% statewide, 95% absentee Bladen.
Treasurer: Dan Blue III 58% statewide, 89% absentee Bladen.

Election day and early voting had somewhat similar results, but not as pronounced. That is, the Bladen County Public Improvement PAC can suggest how to vote, but a voter would be free to vote their choices in private. I suspect, white voters may be less inclined to follow the recommendations of the PAC (Bladen County is 38% black. To see geographic distribution display a political map of the county).

North Carolina requires the marking of an absentee ballot to be witnessed by two persons (one, if a notary). A runner can help you apply for an absentee ballot, which will be mailed to the voter's mailbox. But before it can be marked, there has to be two witnesses. So presumably two runners come back to witness the voters marking the ballot. The statute says that the witnesses should respect the secrecy of the ballot.

But if you are the witness, could you stand out on the front porch and be sure that the voters actually marked the ballot? Besides what kind of rural North Carolinian is going to leave a visitor standing on the porch. They might do that in Fayetteville or Wilmington, and who knows what kind of stuff goes on in Charlotte or Raleigh, but not in Bladen County. A voter may ask for assistance. The assistant is to mark the ballot at the voter's direction.

So the witnesses hand the voter the sample ballot, and avert their eyes as they drink their lemonade, and murmur their assent when the voter says she wishes that Obama was running again, "Yes'm".

Perhaps the voter doesn't have her eyeglasses, or her arthritis is acting up and it is hard to hold a pen. So the witnesses read the sample ballot. "For governor, it says to vote for Ken Spaulding. Should I mark the ballot for Spaulding?"

Or maybe the voters finishes the ballot, and the witness asks if they had voted for Water & Soil Supervisor (it was 29th office on the ballot, the only non-partisan office, and only had one on-ballot candidate). Maybe the witness takes a look at the sample ballot, and notes, "I see that there is a write-in candidate Franklin Graham, do you want me to write his name in?" The witness then writes the name in at the "request" of the voter.

The witness is then to observe the voter placing the ballot in the envelope and sealing it. The voter then fills in a form, and signs it, and the witnesses sign it. In addition, if someone assisted the voter, the assistant is supposed to sign the form.

Horace Dunn's explanation was that the runners didn't realize that they were supposed to sign as assisters, even if they only wrote "Franklin Graham" even if they didn't do the bubbles. The runners may or may not have actually been paid per voter, but only compensated for gas and other expenses. If any runners took advantage of the PAC it was only due to poor bookkeeping.

This was all brought up after the McCrory-Cooper election, when the curiosity of dozens of ballots with "Franklin Graham" written in the same hand, was claimed to be an example of widespread election fraud that had cost McCrory the election.

But it is difficult to prove actual fraud, since there were likely actual voters, and they were willing to be influenced by persons who were supposed to be witnesses as they marked the ballot (if someone is supposed to maintain the secrecy of the ballot, should they hand the voter a sample ballot recommending to the voter how they should vote?). It is a system that is susceptible to corruption.

At the 2016 primary, Ken Register upset an incumbent Democrati county commissioner, Wayne Edge. By a 948:929 margin. The 19 vote margin was just outside the one percent margin to trigger a recount. Register won the absentee vote 189:14. Edge received 54.7% of the in-person voting, both one-stop and election day, but only 6.9% of the absentee vote.

Register would go on to lose the general election to a Republican who I suspect is the first Republican elected as county commissioner in an Bladen County district since Reconstruction. Register made a claim that memory sticks had been tampered with and also claimed absentee ballot fraud. The Republican, Ashley Trivette received 55.8% of the live vote, but only 28.5% of the absentee vote.

Edge ran for the county commission as a Republican in 2018, but narrowly lost to an incumbent Democrat. There are two commissioners from each of three districts, who are elected to overlapping 4-year terms.

Meanwhile in another district, a Democrat-turned Republican was re-elected with 64% of the vote. He had been unchallenged as a Democrat in 2014. The NC representative for the county was also re-elected as a Democrat-turned Republican (he had voted for the Republican redistricting plans and generally sided with the majority).

The three at-large members of the county commission are elected under a limited voting scheme where each voter is limited to one vote. At the 2016 primary, the press noted that the Democrats had chosen their two commissioners, apparently assuming that the normal pattern on one black Democrat, one white Democrat, and one Republican would hold. But in the general election, the black Democrat took so much of the Democratic vote, that two Republicans were elected.

38% of the county is black. That is enough to control the Democratic primary, but not to prevent Republican dominance if they do take control of the primary.

---

So what is being missed by the press is this longtime practice of curious absentee voting in Bladen County. The NCSBE Democrat member from Robeson County when he noted this long sad history in his part of the state, was not talking about Republicans. What eventually will be determined is that absentee voting is susceptible to corruption, but that no actual fraud took place. Mark Harris will be elected.

---

Fun fact. The composition of the NCSBE has been ruled unconstitutional by a state court (in October). They stayed their decision until the NCSBE has certified the election results. Does the NCSBE stay in place with their current nine-member board, or does Cooper demand a 3:2 Democrat-dominated board take its place and take over investigation?

Has anyone pointed out these mail-in results yet?

()

Pittenger was elected from a much different district in 2014.

He finished third in every county outside of Mecklenburg in the 2016 primary.

In Bladen County, Pittenger received 9.5% of the vote in person.

The 2016 congressional primary was a stand-alone primary (there was also a judicial race, but that won't draw voters). The presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial, etc. primaries had been held three months earlier. Even regular voters might be inclined to skip such an election.

North Carolina does not have permanent Vote By Mail. You have to apply for each election. Relatively few voters vote absentee. If you are in a rural area, you might not trust the use of mail box along a rural road. You prefer to drive into town a couple of days a week to pick up your mail out of a locked box at the post office, and do whatever business you have, maybe stop by the cafe for lunch or a cup of coffee. Since the House primary was the only race, it would be the candidates doing GOTV, and helping voters apply for an absentee ballot, which in this case would be a convenience.

The "third-place candidate" in 2016 received 30.6% of the vote in a true three-way race. He had 54.5% of the in person vote in Bladen County.

whats the other county data. It looks suspicious but I would need to see it next to the other counties.

I would think getting 96% of the absentee by mail vote would be suspicious regardless. Nonetheless

https://er.ncsbe.gov/contest_details.html?election_dt=05/08/2018&county_id=0&contest_id=1547

Of course, there's no Democrat involved in the GOP primary, so how cold it possibly be fraud?

What jumps out at me are the turnout differences in Bladen and Robeson (for the primary.) Higher than average. Whereas, in the general, Robeson (where so many absentees didn’t get returned) is much lower.

One of these things is not like the other thing:

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Harris did slightly better in absentee ballots than in-person ballots.

Absentee: 61.4%
Election Day: 58.9%
One Stop: 55.8%

The One Stop is going to skew a bit since it is located in Elizabethtown. McCready carried P501 with 56,8% of the two way vote.

In 2016 there were One Stop (early voting) in Bladenboro, Dublin, and East Arcadia, in addition to the county seat of Elizabethtown.

Relative to 2014, election day turnout was down in P60, P15 which are near Dublin, P202, and P201 near Bladenboro, and P501 and P502, and P40 near Elizabethtown, despite overall turnout being up for the presidential election.

In 2018, with the closing of the three branch One Stop locations, turnout on election day rebounded in P60, P15, P202, P201 around Dublin and Bladenboro, and increased in P30 near East Arcadia. It remained at the same level in P502, P501, and P40 near Elizabethtown where there was still a One Stop.

This indicates that One Stop voting will be overly represented by Elizabethtown which is more Democratic-leaning than the remainder of the county.

The Republican state senator candidate had about 4.2% more election day votes in the district. But he is at least from eastern North Carolina, albeit from Southport in Brunswick County on the Coast. Wayne Brisson the Republican state representative ran 9.7% ahead of Harris. He switched parties this election and is from Dublin in the county.

Harris ran behind the local Republicans in Bladen County.

Can’t help but notice the so called “liberal biased” MSM is not really giving this story airtime

Jim- Spin as you will. Harris hired a man who engineered the illegal taking of ballots from old black rurals and either changed them or threw them away. Your “no, do this with the numbers; look over here” “state senator...one stop...blah blah” doesn’t change the anomalies in Bladen and Robeson. It’s sad you’ve been here this long and don’t get election stats better than that.

Plus, you weren’t even responding to what you quoted of mine. Why’d you bother?

“Harris ran behind the local Republicans in Bladen County.”

Harris is clearly a misogynistic sleaze who feels the need to cheat to win, so that’s not surprising.

Do we reallly know this illegal activity is attributable to the Harris campaign though? If it was done in 2016 as well for a different Republican challenger, it just as easily be a local group of hyper-partisans.

This is absolutely wild.  The more I read and see, the more I'm convinced.

Is it attributable to Harris himself? I can’t say. McCrae Dowless worked for that challenger in 2016 and then Harris this year. He’s been convicted of fraud (insurance scam) and testified before the state BOE and implied he was involved in fraud in the 2016 election. Read the article on the previous page.

Yeah, we actually do.

Plot 55.1% election day, 86.6% absentee. Would that be an outlier?

Also, the underlying model is flawed.

If 0% of election day vote was for a Democrat, I would expect 0% of mail ballots.

And if 100% of mail ballots were Democrat, I would expect 100% of in person ballots.

A larger share of Democrat votes were cast as mail ballots than any other county in the district.

Hate to point out the obvious, but Bladen and Robeson SHOULD NOT BE IN THE 9TH!!!!


I hope there is a new election, and I hope the State Supreme Court puts this map through a paper shredder, burns the shreds and then forces Mark Harris to eat the ashes.

I have no idea why I quoted you. I apologize for that.

Harris is from Charlotte. The senate candidate was from Brunswick County, albeit on the coast. The representative is from Bladen County (Dublin) and was previously elected as a Democrat. You would expect that.

A county commissioner who had run as Democrat before, ran as a Republican and won with 65% of the vote.

The black population of Bladen County is 38%, You don't start knocking off white Democrats in the primary and expect not to push the county into the Republican column.

The number of total votes cast in Bladen County (in NC-9) relative to 2016 was higher than any other county in the district outside of Mecklenburg.

If all those ballots were tossed in the trash, the high vote anomaly would be even higher.

Are there other places in the US where absentee votes are expected to favor Democrats by 20%? !?!?!  From a Texas perspective that is the anomaly.

No, agreed about Bladen ballots- they weren’t placed in the trash, they were turned in. The anomaly is that Bladen had a comparatively LOW percentage of Republicans turn in absentee (and, in turn a high percentage of Dem and unaffiliated), yet in absentee votes cast, Harris cleaned up and had an unexpectedly high percentage of non- Republican votes. That definitely implies either many Dems and unaffiliated voted for Harris in much greater numbers OR someone completed or changed the ballots. The affidavits certainly suggest the latter.

It’s Robeson with a high request rate and high number and percentage of ballots not returned (two anomalies) that suggests ballots were thrown out.

Anyone who is trying to deny that there was voter fraud... Is blatantly just giving hackish spin at this point. 

Now whether or not Harris knew who he was hiring... and whether or not the Primary or the General where swayed by the Fraudulent Absentee Votes (and likely Fraudulent destroying of absentee votes)... Well these are separate questions to be debated.

But at this point- given the stats from both 2016, and 2018 primary, and 2018 general ... and also the affidavits from locals... the question of was there clear voter fraud---> is not a debatable point.  The answer to anyone who has looked at the information and who is not being a hack... is Yes. 

I think we should call it "election fraud though" -- to me, voter fraud would say that the voters were the culprits here, but that's not the case.

It's funny to me though that the GOP is the one crying about voter fraud or any type of fraud here and there, and yet the ones who actually committed the fraud in the first instance in decades are.... the GOP.

And to someone else's point, it is strange that this story is pretty massive but is not really getting airtime. Though I guess they're just waiting to get official word on what exactly happened before really giving it a lot of play.

In 2016,

Democratic registration was 59.1%, Republican 15.3%, and unaffiliated 25.5%.

Roy Cooper got 46.1% of the vote.

This indicates that 22% of Democrats voted for McCrory, assuming that turnout was the same for all groups, and every Republican and affiliated voter voted for him.

They are concentrating on the resignation of the Democratic chair of the NCSBE for his hackish partisan comments.

Absentee ballot envelopes in North Carolina fit into "a pattern of fraud"

https://popular.info/p/exclusive-absentee-ballot-envelopes

It'll be nice when Bladen County ends up in a Likely D Fayetteville-Robeson seat.

Are you implying 2016 general could have been fraudulent, too, or that anomalies exist all over the place so there’s nothing wrong with the 2018 numbers? A “therefore...” or the like in some of your posts here would help. Unless you’re just throwing data out with no real conclusions relating to 2018.

The 22% Dem vote going to the Repub stands out but not nearly as much as the absentee data from Bladen and Robeson this year.

I'd just like to add here that this is a fairly good example of why voter fraud on a mass scale is practically non-existent: people are too stupid and too reckless, and with the highly-connected world we live in, there are too many people watching and too much detailed data to watch. On top of that, the electorate is too big, so you'd have to somehow be ready to turn in as many of thousands and thousands of votes to guarantee a flip. There are just too many moving parts, too many ways to screw up, too many ways to fall short, and too many interactions with real people that end up leaving a trail of evidence.

In this case, yes, they didn't get caught until after the election, but that might not matter in the end. Based on what we're seeing, I think he only way to swing this election illegally without getting caught would take a lot more sophistication and effort than we're seeing here.

This also shows how useless voter ID laws are since they do nothing to prevent absentee ballot fraud,  which is where the vast majority of voter fraud (The little of it there is) occurs.

Well, this is interesting:

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1069726843526361099

If this was a Democrat, Trump would be tweeting it nonstop, turning it into a major story and serving as the justification for every Republican voter suppression tactic in the country. But since it's a Republican, crickets.

It’s where the vast majority of prosecuted* voter fraud is.

Neither you nor any other living soul has any idea how many non-citizens vote in California. Again, no one has ANY idea - I’m not saying it definitely happens because I don’t know, but I also know that you don’t know it doesn’t happen because there would be no way of knowing.

The point of voter ID laws is to know for sure who votes in our elections. The point against them is because Dems know that in as much as we don’t know, whoever is sliding through the cracks is likely voting for their candidates by large margins.

When you offer driver’s licenses to anyone and then only require a deiver’s license to vote, it is not unreasonable for an outsider to think that maybe the state doesn’t care about non-citizens voting. Look up the laws and requirements in California if you don’t believe me.

Save this name:

Leslie McCrae Dowless

California drives licenses for undocumented immigrants aren't the same as for citizens.

()

Democrats are trying to steal another Congressional Race. They always do.

yep. the nonpartisan election(with 4-5 pubs on it) board that voted unanimously to do an investigation is trying to steal this race for dems.

THE FRAUD CAME FROM THE REPUBLICAN!

Thread. https://twitter.com/JoeBrunoWSOC9/status/1069719818574675969

https://twitter.com/JoeBrunoWSOC9/status/1069723057449783296

https://twitter.com/JoeBrunoWSOC9/status/1069734540661411840

*plonk*

Blah blah blah. I know you're reading this thread and understand what's happening in NC-9. As FLOTUS would say, when you're tempted to post things like this, remember to be best instead.

I don't think he's read any of what is going on. He probably just waved it off as a "nothingburger" since it doesn't benefit his party. I don't really see how any objective person could deny what is going on here. It's not like the 99% of other cases where Republicans cry wolf yet have zero evidence of any wrongdoing. In this case, there is copious amounts of evidence.

Un related, but what's that Ernst map in your sig?

her 2020 map.

While I don’t agree with your characterizations, since people like you only care about voter fraud investigations when democrats are the suspects, I still think the board should certify the race.

yeah as someone who was a bit skeptical of the claims at first but said fine let them be investigated I am now all but certain that there was fraud. Now the investigation is either if Harris had direct knowledge or if the fraud affected the margin.

So what's happened while i was mandated to be gone and took a little bit of a rest here? Haven't caught up on all the news yet. Any conclusive evidence of fraid, un the meantime?

Also IMO  Cooper should have appointed one of the GOP members as head of the board while the replacement is still a dem.
It seems the GOP members are fairly bipartisan and willing to work so he could picked one of the two.
By replacing a contraversial dem with another dem the optics aren't great.

Wouldn't have guess you were a fan!

They are working together for now, but this is North Carolina. That could easily change, especially given that there is a House seat at stake. The NCGOP has built up a solid reputation as totally untrustworthy and consumed by greed and a lust for power, so they should never be given the benefit of the doubt. Now, if we were in another state, perhaps you're right, sure.

I mean the optics would clearly look much better. Or atleast the indie should have been appointed the head. It really isn't good to make the head the head a dem again IMO.

How can you possibly be for certifying the race at this point, given all the information that's come out in the last few days?

SBE has collected info suggesting that high-level Harris staffers may have been aware of Dowless' activities, which his campaign denies. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/north-carolina-election-fraud-investigation-centers-on-operative-with-criminal-history-who-worked-for-gop-congressional-candidate/2018/12/03/7b270a90-f6aa-11e8-8c9a-860ce2a8148f_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8f099cfef9c4) Hundreds of potential witnesses have been identified and state/federal law enforcement are also investigating.

I don't even think it matters at this point. There is a lot of evidence mounting here, and the state GOP already seems to have established that it wants the race certified even if it takes a lawsuit, so I don't think giving them a functional majority on the board is going to help the optics. And if we need a new election, I seriously doubt Fox News, Trump and the state party are going to react any different than if there were 5 Democrats instead of 4.

Living through the past 3 years makes it impossible for me to come to any other conclusion. Say what you want about them, but they don't operate in good faith and haven't for a long time.

That's stupid. I mean, the Republican candidate's campaign is essentially being investigated for fraud and the Democrat's have to appoint a Republican to a nine member board to save face? There are already four Republicans on the board who the Democrats can get to vote with them to show bipartisanship, they don't need to cede their majority on the board to do that. Also, addressing oddities in elections is not the only thing the Board does for the state. Giving up power for a single (admittedly important) issue makes no sense in the longer term.

OH NO im not saying that Cooper should have replaced it and made it 5-3-1.
Im saying he should have made one of two republicans the chairman instead of a democrat. Or at the very least the independent.

I think the Harris lead is insurmountable, and we should stop spending taxpayer funds on this investigation.

You do know this isn't a recount, right? The question isn't whether or not McCready can make up the difference with uncounted votes, it's whether or not election fraud was committed.

at this point bagel just has to be trolling.
Even on RRH about half of them are conceding a new election might happen besides the hard right hacks like Krazen.

Also bagelhttps://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1069730439810768901

*plonk*

And I think so long as McCready is unable to catch up, Harris should be certified regardless of fraud. An insurmountable race ought to lead to certification.

Well there's the problem right there.

Your exponentially increasing stupidity proves the second law of thermodynamics.

*facepalm*

If it's found out Harris was involved with the fraud...there's a good chance he goes to prison.

Again, people’s votes were likely messed with. That’s why we’re having this investigation in the first place and no certification of the results regardless of whether or not McCready can catch up.

Not getting your hopes up about a special =/= recognizing that something is so seriously wrong with how the election took place that a do-over might be necessary at all.

He's either trolling or being willfully stupid.

That's not how this works. Any fraud committed in an election should nullify it regardless of if the candidate trailing can catch up.

The State Election Board has a duty to the citizens of North Carolina to protect the integrity and security of their elections. So they're more than correct to deny/shoot down knee jerk calls to certify the election results anyway.

This whole affair has been reminding me of something from an old book, and I finally found it.  The following is from The Revolution From Rosinante, a science fiction novel by Alexis A. Gilliland.  This is on page 5 of my copy (Del Rey Books, 1981):

no lol
If it is proven the fraud was limited and Harris was not involved then it should be certified. A special election is a waste of money in that scenario and also a middle finger to the other Harris voters and the plurality of voters who wanted Harris.

If fraud is determined to have occurred, would you agree that the result should stand only if the maximum POSSIBLE extent of that fraud would be insufficient to change the result?  (i.e -- if there's ANY way that the fraud could have changed the result, the election should be thrown out.)

Yeah more or less . If they find 907 destroyed ballots/fraudulent ballots go ahead I am fine with it.


Voter fraud although rare probably happened in small individual amounts in every district in the country. Does that mean every election should nullified?
Of course not.  It would be really unfair to Harris if he was innocent(id say its a 50/50 that he is innocent) and the votes did not affect the margin and he also lost the SE.

https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/channel-9-uncovers-similarities-between-absentee-ballots-in-us-house-district-9-race/882660808

Also full article and video link of the witness harvesters. Its looking more and more like fraud but I am trying to keep a neutral perspective here unlike some hacks who believes that a single vote of fraud should mean mcready won.

Anyway a TLDR is say person A harvested ballots from 40 houses. There is a required witness to sign. They signed all 40 houses. Now why would someone be signing as a witness for strangers unless they harvested. Its now overwhelmingly pointing to fraud. Anyway these witness signers probably commited a crime by harvesting but at the same time they thought it was legal. Obviously there will be some punishment but its clear they were just thought they were doing honest work.

Look, my opinion here is that Harris should be seated BUT, there should also be a new election to deal with the massive amounts of fraud, and Harris should barred from the ballot in that election, given it's rather clear he would just steal it.

In any event, it's really just a preview of what the Republican nominee will do against Cooper in 2020.

There is nothing funny about this. You are implying that it's okay to commit fraud if it doesn't effect the result or if the candidate didn't know about it (which seems hard to believe). If voters had their ballots forged or destroyed then they should be given the opportunity to vote in a fair election.

How many votes is required in the House to expel a member? A simple majority or 2/3rds?

im pretty sure expulsion is 2/3 but refusing to seat is just a simple majority.

do you seriously believe that in all 7 districts in California that flipped that there wasn't a single misplaced or tampered ballot using harvesting?
If we find one does that mean there should be a new election.

What's the difference between being expelled and being unable to take your seat?

Your shiny hat needs a new layer of Reynolds Wrap.

expulsion would be in the middle of ones term and unable to take your seat is simply you were never a member to start with or your new term does not exist.

So in theory could democrats just refuse to seat every republican in the house just cuz?

And therein lies the hypocrisy. You want elections overturned based on zero evidence, but you want someone who paid for fraud to be sworn into the House. The process in California is quite transparent and legal representation for candidates can challenge ballots. None of the Republicans who lost even filed a challenge which should tell you that they had no evidence.

California isn't even the subject here, it's North Carolina.

and yeah the senate could retaliate. And I consider myself  an indie who dislikes Trump but if the dems did this I will vote straight R in 2020 including Trump and a large portion of the country probably would

> Implying that either party would ever do that.

yeah exactly some lines are way too far for either party to break due to both the moral implications and the political consequences would be broad.

Yeah, the idea of not seating an entire party is sheer fantasy.  Not seating one member due to a questionable election is entirely different and has ample precedent.

Good call. What was your source?

In therory, lol ... in theory, YES.

Man, some people on RRH are not taking this well at all.

https://twitter.com/RRHElections/status/1068894581377384448
The true nuclear takes come from HoneyBee and Krazen's comments on the website:

HoneyBee:



Krazen:

The most likely is if the Republicans control the House and Senate, and we had a Democratic president. They could do it to neuter the veto and govern by themselves.

I don't think that's what he meant.

But indeed, if we wend up discovering out that the outcome itself won't possibly be changed whether or not the fraud occurred, yet couldn't have swing the outcome, then Harris deserves to be declared the winner.

That is, of course, not to say that no investigations should be opened, in the name of security transparency and simple safety's sake, one (or maybe multiple) certainly should.

And those involved must definitely be held responsible according to the law. Obviously if Harris turns out to have played a part then he will deserve to be prosecuted and the consequences I imagine will be serious (not just removal from the chamber)

most of RRH is taking it reasonably well like Boehner and even Izengabe but those two hacks Krazen and Honeybee just keep spamming muh constitution and MUH GREGOIRE/Franken. Overall they agree by now there is fraud but also did the fraud affect the election.

LMAO. RRH truly is pathetic. They've also cried like babies about Maine's RCV and California's ballot counting.

the maine thing was just pathethic but this time its just two hacks who hate the opposing party with a passion. Like the rest of the comments are quite reasonable and even telling those two to stfu.

I would have voted for McCready in the GE this time around. But, if I lived in NC 9 and there was a special election, there is a decent chance that I would flip my vote to Harris because I don't believe it is ok to have the election invalidated because of alleged fraud (again, I trust Bladen county too) that is not even enough for McCready to catch up if you take that into account.

Honestly I have no clue what will come next. Hopefully certification. But if it is a special election, McCready should be considered the slight favorite from a neutral and strategic standpoint, regardless of your opinion of each candidate.

Those who are asserting the lead is insurmountable are only looking at the ballots turned in, not the ones not turned in. What the data and affidavits suggest are that in Bladen ballots were changed to benefit Harris. In Robeson, the markedly high request rate coupled with the low return rate and the low turnout rate suggests ballots were destroyed. Both of these things mean several thousand ballots could be in question. That’s more than Harris’ margin. Can the BOE ever be certain if the race would have turned out differently? No, and they don’t have to be certain.

The hacks who insist this is nothing need to be ignored. When it happens to the other party, we need to admit the truth and call it for for what it is. Repairing our democracy should be our #1 priority.

If we can sacrifice Al Franken for heavy, inappropriate flirting, they can sacrifice this shmuck for the sake of rooting out election fraud.

()

I guess cheating and breaking the law doesn't matter if it appears that the candidate would've won without doing so, and the candidate should face no consequences whatsoever for their actions. :) :) :)

You are ignoring two factors:

1. Harris could end up in prison. Electoral fraud is not treated lightly.

2. You're assuming that McCready needs to "make up the gap." That's not how electoral fraud works. The integrity of the election is at stake - for all we know, 5,000 absentee ballots for McCready were destroyed. The election is tainted to the point that no valid results can be discerned from it. At this point, the Board of Elections certifying the election would be equivalent to "Harris probably won, but who knows?"


You've mentioned that you "trust" Bladen County - the issue is that there's clearly something here that's illegitimate. There is reason to not trust the elections, and the entirety of the NC Board of Elections has recognized this.

FFS, everybody calm down.

There's an investigation going on and we'll find out soon enough what ends up being done about this race. Stop feeding the trolls like Bagel and 2016 and also stop assuming we know everything already.

Back in 2016, when it was noticed that all the "Graham Franklin" write-ins were the same handwriting, Horace Munn, leader of the Bladen County Improvement PAC, explained that whoever wrotein the names in must not have realized that they had to also sign the ballot as an assistant even though they didn't do the bubbles.

Remember, BCIPAC claimed that they simply provided a sample ballot "suggesting" how the voter should vote. My presumption is that the sample ballot would be provided when the "volunteers" who were only receiving "expense" money to witness the filling in of the ballot.

In theory, a voter should be able to to vote autonomously. If the voter has a vision disability, a person assisting them can read them the ballot. But they can't say "do you want to vote for the witch, the troll, the witch doctor, or the pot head?" or "You want to vote for that nice Miz Clinton, right?" Similarly, if a voter has a motor disability, an assistant may mark the ballot, but only at the direction of the voter. Presumably, inability to write-in a name legibly enough for it to count might be considered a motor disability.

Now think what happens when you vote in person. If a state requires picture ID, the election judges verify the voters identity, otherwise they accept that the voter is who they say they are, and the voter signs the voting roll confirming that they are that person. Pollwatchers could object. Then the voter is given a ballot and they go over to a voting station. It can be observed that they are voting, and that they took the completed ballot and dropped it in the ballot box. If a voter needs assistance, they can choose their assistant, who takes an oath that they will only act as an agent for the voter. While it may difficult to fully comply, it at least reminds the assistant of their duties.

The election judges in effect witness hundreds of voters casting their ballots.

The absentee voting experience is, in theory, equivalent.

A voter makes an application for an absentee ballot. The blank ballot is sent to the address they are registered at. In theory, this is equivalent to handing a voter a ballot at the polling place. They will sign the ballot envelope when they complete voting.

If a runner helps the voter make an application for an absentee ballot, it is not much different from a volunteer driving a voter to the polls. Likely as not, the person is being politically selective in who they assist.

When the absentee ballot is sent out, the runner(s) reappear. They may even be so helpful as pulling the ballot out of the mailbox and walking it to the door. That is only being neighborly.

The runners/witnesses make sure that it is the actual voter voting the ballot. They hand the voter a sample ballot ("only a suggestion, but Mr. Munn thought you might appreciate it"). The witnesses are supposed to make sure that it is the voter who is filling out the ballot, but also to protect the secrecy of the ballot. "I don't know how she voted, she may have glanced over at the sample ballot, and she might have voted for someone else. I was sitting across from the table and so the ballot was upside to me and I couldn't be sure"

After the voter marks the ballot, she puts it in the ballot envelope (equivalent to putting the ballot into the ballot box), fills out an affidavit on the envelope (the equivalent to signing the voting roll), and the witnesses sign it. If anyone provided assistance, such as writing in "Franklin Graham" or filling in the bubbles, they are also supposed to sign as an assistant. According to Horace Munn the witnesses who also assisted by writing in "Franklin Graham" should also have signed as an assistant. If the witnesses who had handed the sample ballot to the voter, had also assisted a voter who had misplaced her eyeglasses, they should have signed as an assistant who was neutral.

Because North Carolina requires two witnesses, the runners work in pairs. The "expert" Gerry Cohen is naive/disingenuous if he thinks that it works where the witnesses are family members, neighbors, are work mates.

If we look at NC-7 in Bladen County we observe:

Election Day: Horton(D) 55%, Rouzer(R) 44%, (L) 1%.
Early Voting: Horton(D) 61%, Rouzer(R) 36%, (L) 1%.
Absentee: Horton(D) 87%, Rouzer(R) 13%, (L) 0%.

Horton did approximately 30% better among absentee voters, vs. in person voters.

And just for fun:

P30: Horton(D) 81%, Rouzer(R) 18%, (L) 1%.

P30 is Carver's Creek township in far southeastern Bladen County. The township is 60% Black, 18% White, and 18% AIAN (Waccamaw Siouan). So the least white township in the county was less strong for the Democratic candidate than the absentee votes.

It appears that news stories have been conflating countywide absentee votes by party, with absentee votes received in NC-9, ignoring those in NC-7.

The NCSBE has ordered Bladen County not to certify the results of the county commission race in District 3, which was apparently won by the Democrat, but had stronger support by absentee ballots.

What I am saying is that in a rural county in The South, with a particularly large black population (38% in this case) you can not assume that persons who are registered as a Democrat will vote for the Democratic candidate, particularly for federal or state office. In the past, there might not be a contested Republican primary for federal or state office, and you could vote in the Democratic primary. At the local level, being a registered Republican, is a lot like being a registered Libertarian. They can vote in the Libertarian primary, where there might be a blank space for a write-in since no one was actually running.

Columbus County to the south just elected its first Republican sheriff ever. It is 54.4% Democrat, 19.5% Republican, and 25.8% unaffiliated. Without carrying all the Republicans and all of the unaffiliated,  and some of the Democrats, this would be impossible.

I assume you know that Bladen County is split between two congressional districts, NC-7 and NC-9. The Bladen County portion of NC-7 is more Democratic than NC-9. The western portion of the county is whiter, the southern portion is blacker, and the eastern part is emptier.

In NC-9, the absentee result was quite similar to the in person result. That is, absentee voters were similar to in-person voters. You could even say that absentee voters were a representative sample of the electorate.

In NC-7, the absentee result was 30% more Democratic than the the in-person electorate. If the absentee voters were polled, you would have selection bias. Your poll would be way off. Alternatively, if you did an exit poll, your results would be off the other way, but not as much because their were fewer absentee voters. This is the anomalous result, not that in NC-9.

BTW, it appears the percentage of Republican absentee voters is countywide, while the percentage of Republican votes is for NC-9 alone.

If we look at Court of Appeals Seat 1, the Republican candidate received 51% of the absentee vote. So he received very little of the Democrat absentee vote (voters will have no idea what a Court of Appeals is, much less who the candidates are. The names don't indicate race, and their first names are Andrew and John (not Andy or Johnny) and both use a middle initial. The only distinction was their party. You could make up an office (for example Interlocutor of Esplanades) and fictional names and get the identical results).

How a contested election is handled in the house:

Article 1, Section 5, U.S. Constitution:




Under the relevant statute, the committee to hear such a challenge is the Committee on House Administration, which is always controlled by the Majority Party by a margin of 6-3.



https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33780.pdf

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1069854138727567366

At this point, the only people still saying "just seat Harris" seem to be Harris and Bagel.

EDIT:

https://twitter.com/BowTiePolitics/status/1069731637062184960

Watch this video. Actual person doing this scheme interviewed and saying she just gave all the ballots she gathered to her superiors and has no idea if they were mailed or not.

For all of those saying Harris should be certified because he would've won with or without fraud (from the NYT)

Harris supposedly got 96% of the absentee vote by mail in Bladen County. What is the precedent for scoring in the high 90s in absentee vote in a county that is roughly evenly split in a race that is roughly evenly split?

I'll take my answer off the air.

"There are people who are registered Democrats in the South who don't always vote for Democrats" is not a meaningful reply. :)

Now across the district the average was 23% not returned while 3400 weren't returned in those two counties and I think the number was something like 60% among native americans. The nyt needs to report those percentage difference as not returned ballots are relatively common but that high a percentage is not normal.

I think the New York Times reporting serves to counter the notion we have much certainty about how many votes are "in play" one way or another. There were simply too many opportunities to disrupt the chain of voting in ways that leave different impacts on the totals (filling in votes for candidates vs. throwing away ballots) that it's a fool's game to believe you know with any precision what the votes should be. That's why it's best to focus on the actual crimes committed by Harris's campaign and its local stooges.

In theory, someone well-informed could do modeling and statistical analysis about what could have happened but in practice people are responding to individual data points and making badly-informed guesses.

Anyway the best article was 538's IMO they summed it up using reporting from other sources and then panned out the stats.

No. While the Constitution says that each house of congress is ultimately “the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members”, The Supreme Court has already said that the House can’t refuse to seat a member just because they don’t like them. There has to be a question about the election returns or their constitutional qualifications to hold the seat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_v._McCormack (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_v._McCormack)

So who gets to decide the question about the election returns? Ryan’s house or Pelosi’s? Pelosi needs the new members to elect her and presumably Harris would be sworn in along with those new members. If he’s sworn in, he’d have to be removed, not refused.

It's striking that even in this map, which I suppose is supposed to be a debunking, NC-13 still has a Democratic PVI. Meanwhile, it's possible to draw more compact equivalents which I've illustrated below:

()
()
()

I suppose likely D is maybe an overstatement for any of these districts with the Trump 2016 numbers in the PVI, but all of these districts have Democratic PVIs and would be stronger for a Democrat than those numbers indicate. They all have very low deviations too.

Given that a scenario where NC's maps get struck down is fairly likely, it seems logical that courts would want to go with a district that look like this.

Pat McCrory won Bladen county by 6 points. Roy Cooper won absentees by 23. Looks like there needs to be another investigation....into the governor.

Cool. What was the discrepancy statewide and in neighboring counties? What stands out with Harris’s fraud is how insane the numbers are compared to every other county in the state. He won absentees with 96% of the vote! Was Cooper in the 90s in Bladen?

I'm not sure where you're getting that information. The website says he won it by a much different amount than you say. Also, yes that absentee result for Cooper is out of line with surrounding areas and the state.

   
Mark Harris   5,413   57.60%   2,519   2,471   420   3
Dan McCready   3,856   41.03%   1,687   1,906   258   5
Jeff Scott   129   1.37%   70   53   6   0

Bolded are the VBM results.  Directly copied and pasted from the NC Elections website, run by Democratic SOS Elaine Marshall.

Harris won 96% in the primary, mind. He "only" won 61% of absentees in the general.

The curious thing about the general is that the makeup of the absentee voter pool was something like 20% GOP, 40% Independent, 40% Democrat, so even factoring in Demosaurs, getting 61% for the R out of that pool is...implausible.

That’s not how it works...

Especially since the data comparisons are to other Southern counties.

I wonder if it's even possible to not seat Harris if fraud hasn't yet been proven to be responsible for his win:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_v._McCormack
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1968/138


This does imply that the House can refuse to seat him if he wasn't "lawfully elected," but I'm unsure at what point speculation, regardless of how much evidence there seems to be, becomes legally relevant. It doesn't seem like the House can refuse to seat him just because some of the votes are fraudulent.

They could expel him with a 2/3 majority though.

Read the thread: way worse than the first tweet implies.

🚨🚨🚨 Hoyer says House should consider refusing to seat Harris amid election-fraud investigation (https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/democrats-could-refuse-to-seat-north-carolina-republican-hoyer-says/2018/12/04/71fe2b12-f7e3-11e8-863c-9e2f864d47e7_story.html) 🚨🚨🚨

The questions of fraud atm are regarding the general, and I don't see why everyone is quick to ignore the similarly odd numbers for Cooper and ignore those for Harris. Its especially odd given Cooper's relative lack of activism on the issue.

I mean, if what you're saying about Cooper was all we had to go on for Harris, I'd think nothing of this whole ordeal. The ballot harvesting scheme we are seeing copious amounts of reporting on is really what is concerning for me. Otherwise I don't like to speculate about election results that much without some sort of reason to (unless a candidate is winning North Korea-style numbers in competitive districts/states/etc, of course)

Remember than all 4 Republicans on the NC Board of Elections refused to certify the result.

There's been more outrage and coverage of conspiracy theories due to Broward being slow to count ballots than there has been of legitimate and apparently persistent election fraud in North Carolina which might have actually affected a congressional race.

holy

I’m thinking if I were an NC-9 Republican, at this point, I’d want a new primary, too.

The people of NC-9 are owed both a new primary and a new general, with independent observers monitoring the conduction of the election.

Yep, we definitely should have independent observers monitoring, from other states (including members of both parties) and also international observers from democratic countries.

It's been reported from knowledgeable sources in NC that if the NCSBE calls a new election, it will be a general election with the same candidates (Harris, McCready, and the Libertarian).

Also, we really need to remind absentee voters that they shouldn't just...give their ballot...to some guy/gal. Mail in ballots are supposed to be mailed by you.

Yep (indeed, in the case of the NCSBE ordering an election re-run, Harris could only be replaced w/ another GOP candidate if he moves out of state). However, if it ends up being the House itself who refuses to seat Harris, then a whole new election is ordered at that point & everything starts over w/ filing, a primary if needed, & then a general.

"Each act of voter fraud in connection with a federal election risks five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, in addition to any state penalties."

Wouldn't it be lovely if McCrae Dowless gets 5 years and $10,000 fine for each instance of ballot fraud?

Yes, I was suggesting if I were a Republican there, I’d prefer the house refuse to seat, declare it vacant, so I could vote for a Republican other than Harris in the Special Primary. On the other hand, if I were a Dem I might want Harris to be the only Republican in consideration, as I suspect he’ll be easier to beat.

I’ve seen Harris say he should be seated (with investigation still going) but has he or a spokesman actually denied any involvement in Dowless’s activities? If he weren’t involved wouldn’t he issue a denial?

What if Harris goes to jail?

He won't go to jail yet lol. That will take a few months. If indicted he is forced to run

Republicans everywhere scream "VOTER FRAUD" and "ILLEGAL VOTERS!" at the top of their lungs for literally decades, and here we have the first authentic, substantiated case of it, and now they're all pessimistic and dismissive simply because it's being done by Republican operatives and benefits the Republican candidate.

Color me shocked.

https://twitter.com/ElizLanders/status/1070075334836531203

Richard Burr jumps on the "redo the election" bandwagon.

Shame, I expected better from him.

Can we temp ban bagel from this board for clear concern trolling. When the ing republican senator says he trusts the board but bagel calls it stealing it's clear that bagel is concern trolling

Do you know what concern trolling is.

Literally any time someone disagrees with the hive mind here the brainless rabble calls for a ban it’s like the French Revolution in Internet forum Shape.

Well then now, like- I do mean...

I do know but I am getting sick of bagel screaming its stealing an election after Richard Burr said there should be a full on investigation. Its clear he is concern trolling. You can read this thread and see I was one of the most open minded people here.

Late February, after McCready wins the redo election:

Bagel: Disgraceful. Of course Harris did worse this time, this race was held after he was exposed as an election fraudster. Clearly unfair.

There's a clear distinction between presenting a different point of view in a way that is well-thought out, and just parroting the same sentiment over and over again without actually adding anything of substance to a thread. Saying that the folks who argue that a poster shouldn't do it are actually the "mindless" ones is peak Moderate Heroism.

Where would we be without our dear moderates, society's *unbiased* warriors here to defend stupidity as being just as valid as intelligence and keep reason and sanity in check.

Bagel just dug himself into a hole early on with his self-righteous skepticism and can't walk it back without fear of looking like an idiot, so he just keeps digging his hole deeper and deeper.

Sworn affidavits by voters? I don't believe them.

Wildly divergent voting patterns? Coincidence.

Testimony by the literal people who committed the absentee voter fraud? I don't believe them.

The GOP Senator of NC saying he thinks redoing the election is proper? What a shame.

While the swearing-in is done en masse, for it to count, you not only have to be in the room but also must have your certificate of election on file with the house. And decisions about which certificates will be on file and which will be held back for Committee on House Administration Review are made by the incoming majority. However, we don't even get to that point because the certificate has not even been submitted - if the state never certifies the election, there is no certificate to put on file, and so Harris is ineligible regardless of what Hoyer/Pelosi want to do.

Called it:

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1070102416828325896

This moderate had enough of him and banished him to Ignoria.

Else they are cucked. Simple as that. They should investigate all the shenanigans in Florida and Georgia, too.

They don't even want the investigation "conducted".   That really shows they have no interests in seeing if there was actually fraud or not, they just want Harris seated no matter what.

The NC GOP doing NC GOP things.

Can’t Cooper just refuse to sign it until the new non-summer majority is seated?

Voter fraud to Republicans is blacks voting. Law and order for blacks only is the new GOP creed.

when is the new non super maj seated?
He has 10 days otherwise its effectively a law.

According to this, January 1.
https://ballotpedia.org/Swearing-in_dates_of_state_legislators_elected_on_November_6,_2018 (https://ballotpedia.org/Swearing-in_dates_of_state_legislators_elected_on_November_6,_2018)

Yeah Cooper can't do much here RIP but the court will strike it down anyway and he should be good by then.

If NC Republicans had to celebrate Christmas in the legislature chamber(s) in order to secure a Congressional seat possibly stolen via fraud, they absolutely would.

How can this even be constitutional?

Just when you think that the Wisconsin GOP or Michigan GOP could take the title for "most corrupt state party", again the North Carolina GOP says "hold my beer."

The NCGOP could literally decide to send state police to kidnap the families' of the state Supreme Court and only release them if they upheld Harris winning and Bagel and Calthrina would still insist that the Democrats protesting their actions are the real problem because they're being "uncivil" and "sore losers".

The thing is, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the NCGOP actually did that.

If Cooper can at least delay 10 days from the passing of the bill, that's 10 more days of investigation. That means Cooper should at least be able to delay to the 17th or 18th at least, depending on how many days it takes NC GOP to pass this in the first place. The NC SBOE said December 21st for the report, right? That's cutting it super-close for the NC GOP.

ok im done
https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1070111027268866051

At this point just finish the math and place a new election.
Honestly actually certify it and refuse to seat harris and restart the election with new primaries as bob pittenger was cheated out of his seat.

Huh? You are mixing things up.

Absentee Vote: Harris 61%, McCready 38%, Libertarian 1%
Election Day: Harris 59%, McCready 39%, Libertarian 2%
Early Voting: Harris 56%, McCready 43%, Libertarian 1%.

Note that the Early Voting location is in Elizabethtown, which is more Democratic than the district as a whole. While anyone in the county may drive to to the Elizabethtown it is less convenient. If one compares the election day turnout to population, that for Elizabethtown is depressed. One can drive or walk over to the library any day for about two weeks and vote, or wait until a particular Tuesday. Ealy voting cannibalizes election day voting.

The absentee voting is representative of the in person voting.

Are you confusing NC-7 with NC-9?

Quite interesting!

Jeff Smith is portrayed as some sort of whistleblower in the general election.

North Carolina election-fraud investigation centers on operative with criminal history who worked for GOP congressional candidate (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/north-carolina-election-fraud-investigation-centers-on-operative-with-criminal-history-who-worked-for-gop-congressional-candidate/2018/12/03/7b270a90-f6aa-11e8-8c9a-860ce2a8148f_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.34366f878c1e)

But in the primary election, Billy Ward, the candidate favored by Jeff Smith, got 55% of all his votes from absentee ballots. Jim McVicker, the  candidate supported by McRae Dowless got 92% of the election day votes, but only 55% of the absentee vote.

()



He’s talking about the primary, for which Dowless was also employed by Harris. See the image above?

Harris got 437 to 17. In no way is that representative of normal. And recall the candidate who got 17 votes was a sitting Congressman.

To add

()

Is the graphic that shows why the 61% figure in the general is an outlier.

These Republican idiots obviously don't understand that by shielding Harris and the fraudsters are giving one more excuse to the House to refuse seating him and order a new election.

McVickers is the incumbent sheriff and this race would include NC7 house voters, where, I assume, Dowless wasn’t offered a $40k bonus. I think McVickers’ opponent was an African American man. Recall the African American woman’s affidavit where she had filled in two local races but left the others (including NC9) blank?

Read this whole thread.  It's just...wow.

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1070149544724365312

It's weird to see the name Joe Bruno show up as the reporter on this story when I associate that name with NY Senate Republicans in the past.

Just say he wasn't actually elected, right?

The best part is the two different fraud guys getting into an escalating blood feud of sorts with each other.

The NCSBE sent letters out between October 29 and November 2nd, informing voters who had requested absentee ballots that only they or family members should return absentee ballots; that they had a right to a secret ballot, and how to check the status of an absentee ballot. It included a notice that it was important that the envelope be opened, and included a hot line number.

The 71 pages are 2 per page envelopes that were returned by the USPS. They were pretty weird. The USPS would say no such address, but I could type the address and find it on Google. One even showed up on Zillow. There were a bunch that said that there was no mail receptacle. It is possible that the NCSBE sent the notice to the voter's address, and not the address that they received mail at.

The dump also includes lists of who brought in the requests for absentee ballots. The voter (or a near relative) must make the request, but it can be delivered to the BCBE by anyone. Dozens were brought in by McRae Dowless, but also Democrat operatives. Others appeared to be from individual families.

There is a 2720 page document made up pf absentee ballot requests. Some of the requests have the voter name, address, etc. printed on them, all the voter had to do was sign the request. An oddity for many of this was that the voters marked that they wanted a Democratic ballot for the general election. Apparently Republicans are better able to read insructions that the check box applies to primary elections. There was also a batch with the voter's names and addresses printed in the same handwriting, the signatures were redacted, but the signing dates were in unique scripts. Another had written set consistently used "E'town" for "Elizabethtown".

There are a few where the BCBE sent a form back to the voter to complete. Some voters were not registered to vote. North Carolina permits a voter to register at the same time they early vote (i.e. One Stop) or vote by absentee. If the voter was not registered, the BCBE would send a registration form, and a new absentee request form, with the name and address typed in.

I only looked through the first 303 pages (of 2720). Based on that sample there were around 1850 absentee ballot requests.

There was also a file with the names and addresses of the voters who made an absentee ballot request, but did not receive a ballot. Nothing like tainting an investigation by making public the list so the press can go interview the voters.

Race breakdown: 134 Black, 335 White.

Party breakdown: 167 Democrat, 121 Republican, 195 unaffiliated.

With campaigns enabling/encouraging voters to make absentee ballot requests, it is not remarkable that a large number were not returned.

Campaigner: Can we count on your vote?
Voter: I don't know. I might have to go down to Wilmington that day.

or

Voter: Didn't we have an election last year? What was that guy who wore the baseball caps?
Campaigner: Donald Trump?
Voter: Yeah that's him, he's married to Obamalenia, right?
Campaigner: That was two years ago, He is president.
Voter: So why are we having another election?

Campaigner: You can vote absentee.
Voter: Abson Teague? Who's he?
Campaigner: You can vote by mail, they'll send you a ballot and all you have to do is send it back in. Here just fill out this form.

The campaigner knows that the voter won't vote, but he gets paid for collecting the form anyhow.

Virginia, what would the bill H 1117 do?

Inside The North Carolina Republican Vote Machine: Cash, Pills — And Ballots

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/dowless-britt-inside-north-carolina-absentee-ballot-machine



This is coming from actual people related to Dowless or who married into that family though, so I would take some of this with a grain of salt. I'm surprised they said anything at all, actually.

Not Virginia, but HB 1117 would revert the state & county election boards back to where they started before the past nearly 2 years of legislative & judicial maneuvering regarding the boards. The potential change back to 3-member county boards comes after an October decision by a 3-judge panel in Wake County that ruled the current makeup that was implemented in December 2016 is unconstitutional (the court left the current 9-member board in place until Dec. 12th while the election investigation is underway) & after NC voters declined to give lawmakers power over the elections board through a constitutional amendment.

Basically, the bill would have the county election boards revert back to 3 members. Out of those 3-member county boards, 2 of the members will have members from the Governor's party. The state board would go from the current 9-member configuration of 4 Republicans, 4 Democrats & 1 independent voter to 5 members, with 3 from the Governor's party.

In particular, the bill would once again split the agency under the oversight of two boards. The 5-member board, controlled by the Governor, would handle only the administration of elections. As has been the practice in the past, the Governor would appoint 3 members of his own party & 2 members of the other major party from lists of candidates recommended by the respective party leaders. A 2nd, 8-member bipartisan board would handle ethics, campaign finance & lobbying, w/ 1/2 the board appointed by the Governor & the other 1/2 by state lawmakers.

At the county level, the 4-member bipartisan boards instituted by lawmakers but scuttled by the courts would return to their traditional 3-member format, w/ the state board appointing the members and the Governor's party having a 2-1 majority. However, the law would still require Republicans on each county board to serve as chair in election years.

The bill would also repeal the long-standing law that state political investigations are handled by the Wake County District Attorney's Office, moving those investigations instead to the prosecutorial district in which the candidate resides.

The proposal would also repeal 6 boards & commissions whose structures were found unconstitutional by judges last month: the State Building Commission, the Child Care Commission, the Clean Water Management Trust Fund Board of Trustees, the state Parks & Recreation Authority, the Private Protective Services Board, & the Rural Infrastructure Authority.

And in what appears to be a rebuke, the measure would repeal the Constitutional Amendment Publication Commission, the 3-member panel charged w/ writing descriptions of proposed constitutional amendments for voter information materials. The 2 Democrats on the commission this year, Secretary of State Elaine Marshall & Attorney General Josh Stein, were outspoken on their opinion that state lawmakers wrote deceptive ballot descriptions of the 6 proposed amendments in the the November election. 4 of the 6 were approved.

However, the bill is likely to change in its next version after having been heard in the House Elections committee.

https://twitter.com/AllisonWSOC9/status/1070352495346622470

Hot take: this election is proof of why voter fraud isn't endemic in America: to steal enough votes to make a difference, like these guys apparently did, you have to trigger a million alarm bells. Fraud on the scale necessary, as committed here, leaves a gigantic paper trail.

I haven’t commented on any of this yet but my gosh. This is some messed up stuff.

That is false. Fraud on an institutional level raises alarm bells sure. But fraud on an individual level raises practically no alarm bells because we have set things up so that there aren’t any alarm bells in the first place.

In that case, the question is how much we should care if someone casts two or so ballots in violation of the law and at great risk to their own freedom. It's wrong and we should take reasonable steps to prevent it, but reasonable to me means not passing regulations that noticeably reduce turnout. Well, unless this kind of fraud becomes a constant, major problem.

Yeah at first I was suspicious but the bipartisan unanimous ruling convinced me to pay attention. It's crazy and I'm now pretty sure Harris knew about the fraud

In a perfect world, zero valid voters would be disenfranchised, and it would be easy and convenient for every one of them to vote; at the same time, it would be impossible for an invalid voter to get through the system and cast a vote.  But the world isn't perfect; it's impossible to design a practical system where both of these are true.  In terms of the negative effect on an election, each of these events (preventing a valid vote or allowing an invalid vote) should have equal weight.  

Consider these cases (the numbers are made up, but illustrate the point):

Case A (perfect world): 0 valid votes prevented, 0 invalid votes allowed.  The result is "correct".

Case B: 1000 valid votes prevented, 1000 invalid votes allowed.  The result is potentially off by as much as 2000 votes.

Case C: 20000 valid votes prevented, 100 invalid votes allowed.  The result is potentially off by as much as 20,100 votes.

Case D: 100 valid votes prevented, 20000 invalid votes allowed.  The result is potentially off by as much as 20,100 votes.  This is the mirror image of Case C.

Clearly, if we can't get to the perfect world of Case A, we should aim to be closer to Case B (with a maximum error of 2000 votes) than either C or D (with a maximum error of 20,100 votes).  In practice, far more valid voters get disenfranchised or discouraged than invalid votes get through.  Some people like to claim that "millions of illegal aliens" cast votes, but these claims are not backed up by evidence.  Studies of the issue have shown that the actual number of invalid votes cast is minuscule.  That is, voting rules are weighted far too heavily on preventing votes as opposed to enabling them, and what we have now is Case C.  We need to move toward B.

Does this mean that the voter fraud in California will also be investigated?

Lol

Do you always get your talking points from Fox News?

What voter fraud?  Provide specifics.

Actually people are being investigated and charged:

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-skid-row-voter-fraud-20181120-story.html


Seems like this was mostly petition-related because they were being paid per-petition and rates had skyrocketed due to the # of initiatives. So it's not really the same, and not as interesting.

-

HOWEVER, if you want to talk about this, make another thread. This isn't a fraud megathread. It's specifically about North Carolina / NC-09. I will split off conversations about this if they balloon in size. Whatboutism isn't relevant to this thread.

Never change.

For the record, please avoid posting large numbers of tweets in a single post. ~3 or so should be the maximum. If there are more tweets you want to share, just use the links instead.

Exactly.

Do we think the large number of returned ballots means someone was filling requests out en masse from the voter rolls?

Anyway its incredible how one man is doing all the investigative reporting for us


Thanks a lot to Joe Bruno. Bigger companies should take a look at him.

For in-person voting, McCready got 53% of the vote in Mecklenburg County, but only 38% in Union County.

Why the 15% difference? I would attribute it to demographic differences. What is your theory?

But in the absentee vote there was only a 4% difference 65% to 61%? How do you explain that?

Joe Bruno is on MSNBC right now

https://twitter.com/JoeBrunoWSOC9/status/1070462687983882241

Why do you keep bringing up different data and not responding to the data I and others bring up? You implied Harris’ 61% in absentee was in line with his ED vote in Bladen. Do you now see it’s a red flag?

Mecklenburg is more urban and less white. Absentee votes are smaller samples and I guess, without a huge absentee effort like we see in Bladen and Robeson, tend to be a more distinct type of voter and use absentee as intended. Young people away at college/in military, elderly with concerns about health care, not sure, but not as diverse a population as those who vote in person. It’s clear absentee is more Democratic than Republican. Except in Bladen. Why is that? (I know but...) can you bring yourself to say it?

ETA: with a higher ED % in Mecklenburg it’s going to be harder to replicate the same margin. Union is whiter and the absentee return rates is higher, that’s going to help the Republican’s margin,

FF
He should be hired by one the big media groups
He has done incredible work with all his investigative reporting for this event all by himself.

It absolutely amazes me that there are ppl who are still trying to explain away all of the data from NC-9.   (On top of the data being proof itself- esp when you also look at the 2016 and 2018 Primaries... there are also the affidavits from those paid to collect these absentee ballots).

I mean at this point- does anyone really think they are going to convince anyone that there is nothing to see in NC-9?

They'll convince the hardcore Republican faithful.  Then if a new election is called and McCready wins it, they'll believe they were cheated, and outrage is a powerful motivator.

...it's happening.

what’s happening?

Read the post above. That sounds like a big deal to me.

Oh. Yeah... that’s not great for Harris. Taste of his own medicine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CNN: More than a thousand absentee ballots possibly destroyed

Clearly, though, we should still seat Harris for...reasons.

Starting to think Harris is more likely to see the inside of an NC jail cell than the US Capitol.

NC-9 scandal: More than a thousand absentee ballots possibly destroyed

https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2018/12/05/lead-drew-griffin-dnt-live-jake-tapper.cnn

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1070543855924244481

lmao

These scum were filling out ballots for literal blind people. Gee wonder if that is legal!

Why doesn't the North Carolina legislature just pass a bill declaring Harris the winner?

I really hope 538 adds the % prison chance to every candidates odds from now on.

Do they have enough to indict Harris now?

I'd like Democrats to have ammo to be able to easily refuse to seat him when the new Congress convenes.

He can't get seated if his election is never certified.

I am certainly no Harris fan... And I think there should be not only a new election... and probably even a new primary.  But do ppl really think Harris knew there was outright fraud going on? (vs thinking maybe that this Bladen Co guy was just aggressive at getting ppl to early vote or something?).

I'm asking b/c I genuinely have no idea regarding the likelihood that Harris knew about the actual Fraud type stuff or not.  In one since I just can't imagine anyone would be so reckless (& not think there was a decent likelihood of getting caught (especially since Harris has to know how odd the numbers would look... since he was on the losing side of this scheme in 2016 (I think).  and he had to think things look fishy in 2016 primary. 

Is it possible that in 2016 he just thought this guy was a pushy salesman type person who legally hustled absentee votes... and so this election he hired him so he would be on the losing end of the absentee battle.... Or did he really know that the votes were being manipulated illegally?  (honest thought... not just knee jerk lock him up... or knee jerk he's innocent)

I'm sure Jesus told him to rig the election. So glad to see this homophobe go down in flames, and hopefully prison. Time to add NC-09 to the Blue Wall as soon as a new election is called for, which brings us to a grand total of 41 seats.

We don't know.

But it's definitely a question now, whereas previously there wasn't any real evidence or suggestion that he might have been aware of McCrae Dowless' actions.

That sounds like when Florida was the first state to formally choose its electors in the 2000 election.

Plus, does anyone think for a second the Democratic congress would seat him in that scenario? No way.