In November 2018, a blue wave brought election victory to Democrats in North Carolina and across the country, sparking a Republican backlash of dubious voter fraud claims. Though those allegations were largely false, a genuine – and genuinely strange – election fraud story emerged.
Republican Mark Harris pulled out a narrow victory in the ninth congressional district. But that result was scuttled when an elaborate ballot-harvesting scheme by McCrae Dowless, a Bladen County political operative in Harris’s employ, was exposed. The ensuing scandal led to national headlines, indictments, the downfall of state Republican leadership and a national media scrum.
This month a new book by two veteran North Carolina journalists goes inside the scandal, with exclusive access to Dowless and the cultural and historical context that made the offenses not just possible but inevitable.
In The Vote Collectors, Michael Graff (Axios Charlotte) and Nick Ochsner (WBTV-Charlotte) write that the situation became a sort of Rorschach test in which different people could see the events and characters according to their own political interests. To Republicans, it was proof that voter fraud existed, and a starting point for arguments that it must be much more pervasive than is acknowledged. For Democrats, it was a satisfying irony; in a season of myriad voter fraud accusations lodged by the GOP, the most consequential and well-documented case involved Republican politicians and operatives.
In an...
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