The Democratic candidate in the nation’s only unresolved House race from 2018 won’t sue to stop a new Republican nominee from emerging, after the prior GOP candidate dropped out amid rising evidence of election fraud.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Dan McCready suggests that a lawsuit would drag out the already extended election process for too long. The south-central North Carolina district has been without representation since the state’s Board of Elections began to investigate ballot fraud allegations and ultimately voided the results altogether.
McCready appeared to come up 905 votes behind the Republican nominee, pastor Mark Harris, on election night. He later retracted his concession as questions mounted about the integrity of swaths of absentee ballots.
Once the North Carolina Board of Elections threw out the election results and ordered a new contest, McCready pondered suing to cancel the GOP primary results — specifically over a law passed last year by the Republican-controlled state legislature mandating new primaries whenever a new election is ordered in a congressional contest. McCready wrote that he had mulled “challenging this law in court — experts say it is probably unconstitutional — but that would just drag out the process even longer, leaving the people without a voice in Congress.”
Still, a lawsuit could have given McCready a distinct advantage, because Harris’s might have been forced to stay on the ballot, though Harris has said he won’t run again, citing health reasons.
The race figures to be a tight contest as the new general election date in November closes in. On Wednesday, former Mecklenburg County Commissioner Matthew Ridenhour said he would run.
Also eyeing the race is GOP state Sen. Dan Bishop, the author of North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which sought limit student bathroom use to their born gender.
