House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi hinted Friday that Democrats may refuse to seat Republican Mark Harris amid election fraud allegations in his North Carolina House race.
Harris appeared to win the House seat in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District on election night, but the state’s board of elections subsequently voted not to certify the results due to irregularities with absentee ballots. If the issue remains unresolved when Democrats take control of the House in January, Pelosi said any member-elect can object to seating Harris.
“The House still retains the right to decided who is seated,” Pelosi told reporters Friday. “Any member-elect can object to the seating, the swearing-in to another member-elect. So we’ll see how that goes.”
Pelosi, who is poised to reclaim the speakership, is in “close touch” with the House Administration Committee, which has the authority to investigate and “determine the winner of the election.”
“Only if it’s impossible to determine who the winner is would we take the extraordinary step of calling for a new election,” Pelosi said of the committee.
“This is bigger than that one seat,” she added. “This is about undermining the integrity of our elections and what was done there is so remarkable and that that person, those entities got away with that.”
The North Carolina State Board of Elections has subpoenaed political consulting firm Red Dome and Harris’ campaign. Harris paid Red Dome during the election, and Red Dome hired Leslie McCrae Dowless, a political operative at the center of the scandal.
Dowless allegedly paid people to illegally collect absentee ballots from voters. It’s unclear how many ballots were unreturned as a result.
Harris currently leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes. The board of elections will hold an evidentiary hearing concerning the irregularities by Dec. 21 and could decide then how to handle it, which includes the possibility of holding a new election.
