The NPR Politics Podcast - New Election Called In North Carolina Congressional Race

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

After months of insisting that he knew of no illegal activity being done on behalf of his campaign, Republican Mark Harris, who leads the race for North Carolina's 9th Congressional District, called Thursday for the State Board of Elections to hold a new election.Shortly afterward, the bipartisan state board voted unanimously to redo the only congressional race left from the 2018 midterm elections that remains undecided. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, and political reporter Miles Parks. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi there, this is Heather W. in Louisville, Colorado. I'm getting ready to go meet my husband for date night. We're going axe throwing. This podcast was recorded at... Best of luck. It is Friday, February 22nd at 12.08 Eastern. Please note, things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully not the number of fingers and toes attached to my body. Oh no. They say axe throwing is actually pretty safe. I don't know, but a lot of people do that

while also drinking, which feels very unsafe to me. Good point. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It is 2019, but in terms of the elections we talk about, we've just skipped past and talked all about 2020 elections. However, now we have a 2019 election to tell you about, and it is a big deal. Yesterday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections called a new contest in a congressional race that has been rocked by accusations of fraud. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. Hey, Miles, you are in North Carolina. You've been there all week. It has only gotten crazier here. Yeah. And there is a whole lot of crazy to sift

through ending with the fact that the Board of Elections called a new a new contest. But let's just start back at the beginning. Kelsey, can you catch us up to speed on what this district was and going into Election Day, why we were already paying attention to it. Yeah. So this is a Republican district near Charlotte, which is one of the biggest cities in the state of North Carolina. And I was down in North Carolina in a neighboring district right before the election talking to Republicans about just kind of politics in the state in general. And they were all really worried about this race in particular because they thought the Republican who Mark Harris was maybe too far to the Republican, Mark Harris, was maybe too far to the right for a city that was changing dramatically. And they thought there was a really

good chance that Democrats could win this seat. And then they didn't. But Harris, after Election Day, has a slim lead, about 900 votes. What happens next? So what happens next is the State Board of Elections comes together to certify all the races in the state. They certify most of them, and then we come to the 9th Congressional District and they decide not to certify it. They vote instead to open up an investigation into allegations of election fraud. So then over the last couple months, State Board investigators have been interviewing

witnesses, hundreds of people, voters, people who say that they were involved in what is now coming out to be an absentee ballot scheme, which seems to have been connected in some way to Republican Mark Harris's campaign. So and this isn't just a general problem. It has to do with one specific Republican consultant. Can you walk us through who he is, what he was doing, and what the problem was? Right. So his name is Leslie McRae Dallas. He goes by McRae. He has been involved in politics in a place called Bladen County, which is in the eastern part of the 9th District for many years. Mark Harris approached McRae Dallas because he had heard about this absentee ballot campaign that Dallas had been running for other candidates in previous elections. Basically now,

what it looks like is that McCrae Dallas was paying people to collect ballots, which is illegal in North Carolina. And there are still a lot of questions about whether Dallas turned in all of the ballots he collected. One employee of Dallas's, who's also his former stepdaughter, testified on the first day of the hearing earlier this week that she also filled in some ballots for voters who turned in their ballots blank to her, which is also illegal. Hey, Miles, can I ask, is it illegal to be paying somebody to collect the absentee ballots, or are they saying that just collecting them in general was the illegal part?

So collecting them in general was the illegal part? So collecting them in general is the illegal part. What's really interesting here is voting laws are different all over the country. Collecting ballots is not illegal in a lot of states, including the largest state in the country, California. But in a place like North Carolina, it is illegal to collect ballots. And so the fact that potentially somebody who was being paid by Mark Harris' campaign was doing it, there's the question of taint on the election because somebody, one of the candidates could have had an unfair advantage in the absentee ballot totals. And before we get to this dramatic hearing that's been taking place the last few days, what was the tip off that something might have been wrong? Was it disproportionate results

from absentee ballots? Was it just the fact that this guy had a track record for doing this in previous elections? What caused investigators and election officials to focus on this to begin with? So it's a little bit of both. State investigators had investigated Dallas previously, specifically in 2016. That investigation did not end up affecting an actual race. But the biggest thing that got national attention was the numbers. North Carolina is really transparent about their voting data. And so they post the numbers of how many absentee ballots have been returned for each party. And some people looked into this, national voting experts, and realized, whoa, something very odd is happening in Bladen County specifically.

We saw that 19% of the absentee ballots that were turned in were turned in by registered Republicans. But Republican Mark Harris won 61% of the absentee ballots in that county. So for him to have done that, he would have had to win every Republican that turned in an absentee ballot, every unaffiliated voter who turned in an absentee ballot, and some Democrats, which really set off a lot of alarms. So Kelsey, up until a few days ago, Harris was saying, I should be seated in Congress. The board didn't certify his elections. House Democrats chose not to seat him either. What have Republicans in Washington been saying about this, especially given the fact that President Trump and other Republican leaders talk so much about their concerns about voter fraud? wait and see what this board of elections decides. They've tried to stay as far away from this as possible, in part because there's some question about whether or not, if they call this new election, as we're about to discuss,

whether or not Harris would be running and what Republicans in the state would do about choosing somebody to run for the seat that they very, very, very badly want to keep. Okay, so now we have filled in all the backstory. We are going to get to all of the drama that happened in this hearing room and what it means going forward after a quick break. The current tension between the United States and North Korea is really intense, and it's easy to

forget that the two countries have a complicated past. On the latest episode of ThruLine from NPR, we look back at the origin of the strained relationship to make sense of what's happening today. ThruLine, the podcast where we go back in time to understand the present. Okay, we're back. And Miles, now we really get to what your week has been like. And based on your Twitter threads, it has been busy. This has been an incredibly dramatic hearing. Even before the decision to hold a new election, there were family members turning on each other. There were tears. There were big revelations. What happened this week?

Everyone knows each other in Bladen County. When I went down there, people just talk about McCray Dallas. Everyone talks about him by first name. They know each other. So we had a former just talk about McCrae Dallas. Everyone talks about him by first name. They know each other. So we had a former stepdaughter of McCrae Dallas testify. We saw his former wife testify. And then the most dramatic moment of the entire week came when Mark Harris's son took the stand. Now, this was incredibly emotional.

Mark Harris himself was seen crying in the hearing room. John Harris, who's the son, he's a assistant U.S. attorney in North Carolina. He was really important not only for the emotional aspect, but because his testimony was really the final nail in Mark Harris's argument for being certified and not holding a new election. Wait, so all of these people were testifying against their family members? Right. So let's hear a little bit about that testimony of Harris's son testifying against his father. I love my dad and I love my mom. Okay. I certainly have no vendetta against them. No family scores to settle okay I think they made mistakes in this process and they certainly did things differently than I would have done them but I think

about all of this and engaging in this process and watching it all unfold I've thought a lot more probably about my own little ones than my parents and the world that we're building for them. And I will be frank, Mr. Chairman, watching all this process unfold. We have got to come up with a way to transcend our partisan politics and the exploitation of processes like this for political gain, that goes for both parties, Democrats and Republicans and libertarians. And frankly, when I'm coming out of this process, I'm just left thinking that we can all do a lot better than this. That's all I have, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you. So, Miles, just to be clear here, Harris had gone into this week's hearing defending his campaign, defending his lack of knowledge about this absentee ballot operation. And his son was saying, no, that's not true. He knew about it because I warned him about it. Right. John Harris said that he had done some pretty advanced data analysis on the 2016 election, which his dad had also run in and lost in the Republican primary. McCrae Dallas had been working for the third place finisher in that primary and had seen and John Harris saw some very interesting absentee ballot totals on behalf of this third candidate.

So he does this data analysis and realizes when he looks at the public records that absentee ballots were being turned into the local board of elections in what he called batches. So he gets this suspicion that somebody in Bladen County is collecting absentee ballots. He's an attorney. He knows that's illegal. So he tells his father multiple times on the phone, even in email, they showed emails where he's saying, I think what's happening is somebody is collecting absentee ballots, which is illegal.

He even sends him the statute in North Carolina law that says it is illegal. So that really cut into Mark Harris's argument, not necessarily that he knew that people were collecting absentee ballots. He says that McCrae Dallas promised him that that wasn't happening, but that he also had argued that he wasn't warned by anybody when we have his own son saying that he warned him and we have documents to prove that. And after that, that emotional and pretty damning testimony, Harris got on the stand himself and he said this. Through the testimony I've listened to over the past three days, I believe a new election should be called. 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. So I have a couple of practical questions here. The voters of the North Carolina 9th District haven't had a member of Congress and it is, gosh, the end of February now. Presumably it takes a little bit of time to schedule a new election. How long are they saying this is going to take and what happens next? Do they just skip right ahead and, you know, have the rerun the general election Or how do they say this is going to play out? It definitely looks like voters in the 9th District are not going to have representation in the U.S. House until at least late summer, early fall. That's because there needs to be a new primary as well as a new general election. North Carolina passed a law at the end of last year that said if you hold a statewide new election that you need to hold a new primary as well, which brings up the super interesting question of, is Mark Harris going to run again? And if he does run again, can he get the support of state Republicans? He was already, as you mentioned, Kelsey, a really socially conservative Republican who had ran a tight race in a district that had leaned Republican in the past. So with

all of this baggage? Is he going to be able to come out of a Republican primary? And if not, how does that change the landscape of what this race looks like? The Democrat in the race, Dan McCready, he is a Marine veteran who started a small business in the solar sphere. So he is kind of a tailor made Democratic candidate, a central centrist Democrat who has military experience. OK, so, Kelsey, last question on all of this is for you. In 2017 and early 2018, every time there was a special election, everybody went nuts about it because Democrats were trying to we're trying to test out messaging, trying to test out fundraising, trying to show that they could retake the House. Well, they have retaken the House by a lot.

So given that the power balance in the House is pretty set right now, how much of a focus, how much attention do you expect this upcoming special election to garner? You know, it kind of depends on timing, because as we know, there's a lot happening in Washington right now. We have all of the Russia investigations and Democrats are launching their own investigations into President Trump and his administration. Plus, they're trying to pass bills on gun control and health care. So a lot of their focus is there. But they do really want to make a point here in that North Carolina is a place that is changing and they are trying to make the point that Democrats can be a part of change in the South. So I'd expect them to spend a lot of money and a lot of time trying to flip this seat. Though I will say it really depends on what happens in the primary that Miles was mentioning,

because if Republicans are able to get some sort of new candidate that gets a lot of new Republican energy, there might be a little bit of reassessment that happens. Because as it stands right now, Democrats are pretty convinced that Republicans are either just not going to show up because they're going to be embarrassed by what happened in this last election, or they're going to just feel disaffected. So it kind of depends on, like I said, the timing and, you know, who's running. And as you mentioned, we expect North Carolina to be one of those top level states contested in the 2020 presidential election. I'd also add that Democrats have made it clear that they want to make election security a priority

going into the 2020 election. So that could really give them motivation to be heavily involved in this race. All right, well, Miles, you have had a very busy week. Get home safe from North Carolina. Thank you very much. That's going to do it for all of our podcasts this week. We'll be back as soon as there's news. Who knows when that will be? I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.