On today’s BradCast: It looks like it’ll be several more months before we actually have a member of Congress seated in the 2018 U.S. House race in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional district. But, as of dramatic developments last night and again today, at least we now know that a new election is finally on the way. [Audio link to show is posted below.]
After a stunning past 24 hours, the NC State Board of Elections voted 5 to 0 on Thursday to hold a new election, following dramatic, surprise testimony on Wednesday at a public hearing over the disputed results of last year’s NC-9 House election. Republican Mark Harris is said to have defeated Democrat Dan McCready by just 905 votes out of more than 275,000 cast, but evidence of absentee ballot fraud by a Contractor hired by Harris prevented the Board from certifying the results.
On Wednesday, John Harris, an assistant U.S. Attorney and son of the Republican candidate, took to the stand at this week’s public hearings to turn against his father by detailing warnings he had given his dad about the Republican absentee ballot contractor, McCrae Dowless, whose record of defrauding elections was clear long before he was hired by Harris for his 2018 campaign.
Today, we break down both the backstory from 2016 through the 2018 contest, as well as the astonishing key events from the past 24 hours in which John’s testimony brought his father to tears in the hearing room [see photo above], and also stunned the McCready campaign which similarly not known in advance of John Harris’ plan to take the stand to testify against his father’s claims of innocence. “I thought what he was doing was illegal, and I was right,” said John, discussing Dowless’ record. In his own teary closing statements, he testified: “I love my dad, I love my mom, O.K.? I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle, O.K.? I think they made mistakes in this process and they certainly did things differently than I would have done.”
And with that, and a few other comments about the need to “transcend our partisan politics, and the exploitation of processes like this for political gain,” we’re happy to offer John Harris our coveted if more-rarely-than-ever-bestowed BRAD BLOG Intellectually Honest Conservative Award. We haven’t given one of those out in years!
Moreover, just minutes before the testimony, emails and texts between father and son were released, detailing the warnings John had given his father Mark (a Baptist minister!) about Dowless, which undercut the Republican candidate’s long-repeated, if never-believable public insistence that he’d known nothing about Dowless’ penchant for forging absentee ballots.
In 2016, Harris lost the Republican primary by a very slim margin after losing an impossible number of absentee votes in Bladen County to the another candidate who had hired Dowless. In 2017 the state Board of Elections referred the election fraud case to the U.S. Attorney at Trump’s Dept. of Justice. But the DoJ took no action, despite the mountain of election fraud evidence uncovered by state investigators from the 2016 GOP election fraud scheme. All before Harris hired him for his 2018 campaign and what state officials described earlier this week as a “coordinated, unlawful, substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme”.
The 5 to 0 vote of three Democrats and two Republicans on the Board to hold a new election followed Mark Harris’ own testimony in which he tried to distance himself from his son’s damning testimony and attempted to defend his months of demands he be seated, before finally declaring today: “It’s become clear to me that the public’s confidence in the 9th District seat general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted.”
Buckle up for the entire sordid and remarkable tale as it unfolded today and the many subsequent unanswered questions raised by this entire shameful mess.
Then, how hand-marked paper ballots were instrumental to uncovering the NC fraud scheme, how the recent report that Trump’s DHS has moved resources from election oversight to immigration/border matters in advance of the 2020 race, and the disturbing story of the long-time Coast Guard official who, according to federal prosecutors on Wednesday, was a White Supremacist domestic terrorist plotting to murder “leftist” Democratic members of Congress (many of whom have been singled out by Donald Trump), along with MSNBC and CNN media figures “on a scale rarely seen in this country.” That, on the very same day that Donald Trump tweeted, yet again, in all caps, that journalists are the “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
Finally, Desi Doyen brings us the latest Green News Report on the Trump Administration punting on action to prevent incredibly toxic chemicals in our drinking water, another global heat record last month, and even a bit of good news out of Australia for a change….
It’s finally happening. The people who promote and live out the attitude of “the ends justify the means” are getting caught and fully exposed. This attitude is not exclusive to Republicans but is a very regular practice of them. Breaking campaign laws because promoting the party justifies everything, cruel and I humane treatment of asylum seekers because we need to keep this country as white as possible, economic destruction of the middle class because it helps the donors to campaigns. The ends justify the una American , in humane, and selfish behavior . Progressive policies could be the answer as long as we remember that how we get there is just as important and ethical as getting there.
“we’re happy to offer John Harris our coveted if more-rarely-than-ever-bestowed BRAD BLOG Intellectually Honest Conservative Award. We haven’t given one of those out in years!” – Brad
Excellent choice. A rare breed.
How To Identify The Despotic Minority – 8
I noticed Bill Gates didn’t answer my “tough question” he asked for in last this years Gates Newsletter. Maybe it was too long:
Fantastic show today Brad!
Because of your ongoing coverage of Marilyn Marks’s great effort in Georgia, I’m slipping both of you a $20. Together, you may just make the difference we all know needs to happen!
Thanks!
P.S. Do you know what kind of voting system they used to elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Larry @3 cited:
“Some sort of”? Really, Mr. President? That’s the best you can do? Well, good news for him and very bad news for voters and those of us in the public who would like overseeable, verifiable elections. GA, CA, TX, PA, IA, DE, KS are all in the process of moving to “some sort of paper ballots”. Namely, the type that are marked by touch-screen computer and are 100% unverifiable.
Nice job, Bill! Jesus.
Larry @ 4:
Thank you, sir.
And for that too.
Hand-marked paper ballots, tabulated by computer op-scan systems.
Thanks, Brad.
Sounds like they used a glitchless system there. How do these things happen? 🙂