Few political controversies have lent themselves more easily to stupid misrepresentation in recent years than voter fraud. On the one hand, Donald Trump and his most vocal followers claim “millions” vote illegally in the United States and that any close election that moves from the “R” column to the “D” column as votes are counted must be the result of fraud. On the other, an incurious news media respond by repeating the false claim that there is “no evidence” of voter fraud in the United States, even as they insist in other contexts that Russian bots managed to throw an entire presidential election.
Of course, neither of these unthinking reactions is anywhere near accurate, as a North Carolina congressional race reminds us. Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready were competing for the state’s Ninth Congressional District. Harris won the race by 905 votes—less than half of 1 percent of the votes cast. That’s not such an unusual circumstance in House races, but election officials in one of the rural counties, Bladen—which is split between the Seventh and Ninth districts—noted an unusual spike in requests for absentee ballots. Bladenboro has only 1,700 people, but state records indicate that more than 700 of them requested absentee ballots by mail. Of those, 328 were returned.
It is unlikely that so many of Bladenboro’s residents were traveling or otherwise unavailable on November 6. There was, rather, a concerted effort at “ballot harvesting”—operatives visiting potential voters, persuading them to fill out absentee votes for a favored candidate, and then mailing the ballots to the election board. In North Carolina, it’s a felony for someone other than an election official or an immediate relative or guardian to deliver an absentee ballot to a voter or to take a ballot from a voter and mail or deliver it to the election board. Yet across the district, operatives of the Harris campaign aggressively urged residents to request absentee ballots and pushed them to vote for Harris (which is illegal) and even delivered ballots to the election board for them (also illegal).
Local media have interviewed dozens of residents—many, it’s fair to say, otherwise unlikely voters—who allege they were visited by campaign operatives and pressed to vote absentee. One woman admitted to Charlotte’s Channel 9 that a political consultant named Leslie McCrae Dowless paid her to pick up absentee ballots. Dowless, not coincidentally, ran Harris’s get-out-the-vote efforts. He was also convicted of perjury in 1990 and served a prison sentence in 1995 for fraud. In last May’s primary in N.C.-9, won by Harris over incumbent Robert Pittenger, a full 22 percent of Bladen voters mailed absentee ballots and almost all of those—96 percent—were votes for Harris.
In neighboring Robeson County, also part of the Ninth District, election officials were also overrun by requests for absentee ballots: 2,433 people in this rural county wanted them. Only 205 of those requests came from registered Republicans. That’s not necessarily evidence of fraud—it’s not illegal for a third party to deliver absentee ballot requests, just the ballots themselves—but it is an abuse of the system and lends itself easily to fraud.
By all appearances an election that went for Mark Harris might well have gone to McCready without the illegalities. North Carolina’s Board of Elections has unanimously refused to certify the race. The news media and Democrats—their indignation piqued, a cynic might note, by the fact that a Democrat lost—are suddenly ready to acknowledge the reality of voter fraud.
Ballot harvesting, incidentally, has been legal in California since 2016. On election night, seven Republican-held seats in the state seemed to remain in the GOP column but in subsequent weeks flipped to the Democrats as extraordinary numbers of absentee and provisional ballots were counted. House speaker Paul Ryan scandalized Washington’s press corps when he suggested California’s system is “pretty loosey goose” and “bizarre,” but he has a point.
Some observers wish to draw a distinction between voter fraud—multiple votes by the same person or votes by dead or nonresident individuals—and election fraud, which usually involves the illegal manipulation of legal votes. This a distinction without a difference. While it’s completely false that elections in the United States are routinely rigged by wholesale fraud, it’s demonstrably true that hacks and operatives from both parties tamper with electoral processes when they can—sometimes illegally.
Elections aren’t magically immune from the human tendency to bend the rules and cheat. Laws requiring valid identification and signatures are necessary, Democratic claims that they are “racist” to the contrary. Nor is it wise—as our Democratic friends often express enthusiasm for doing—to make voting easier and easier: absentee votes delivered by third parties, early voting, even proposals to vote online. To cast one’s vote is a sacred privilege and should involve a little effort. A little effort, that is, on the part of the voter, not the campaign hack.
