Today, Explained - Fraud, actually

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

One man in North Carolina may have swung an election by defrauding voters. But North Carolina is interested in stopping a different type of voter fraud. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are all sorts of things you can do around the holidays for people. You can make a charitable donation in someone's name. You can buy someone a goat in someone's name. You can also give them a Quip electric toothbrush. You can find out more at getquip.com slash explained, where your first set of refills is free. David Graham, you're a staff writer for The Atlantic. You've become the unofficial North Carolina correspondent for Today Explained. The midterm elections have been over for more than a month now,

but there's still a big midterm story in North Carolina. What's going on there? One election still has not been officially certified, and that's in the 9th Congressional District. There are accusations of a massive election fraud, and they're investigating, and we're not sure what's going to happen. How close was that election? 905 votes. Damn. So how do people find out that something suspicious might have happened there in that election? Well, this is one of the weirder things, is that there was nothing weird apparent initially. You know, the election came and went.

Mark Harris, the Republican, appeared to have won. Dan McCready, the Democrat, conceded the race fairly quickly. But then towards the end of November, when the Board of Elections met to certify the results, the then vice chair of the board said that he opposed certification, he had concerns. So the board agreed to delay and they still haven't certified and they're investigating. And why did they refuse to certify it? Well, there are some really curious numbers on absentee ballots and sworn affidavits from various people about a guy named McCrae Dallas. McCrae Dallas. Correct.

The state's board of elections has named McCrae Dowless as a, quote, person of interest in an absentee ballot and voter turnout operation that has called the results of one House election into question tonight. He is a colorful character. He's a convicted felon. There was a case about 30 years ago where he was accused of taking out a life insurance fraudulently on an employee of his who had died and trying to collect the money. After that, he went into politics and he works on these get out the vote operations. You know, what he does to get out the vote, I think, is the question.

There are obviously legal ways to do that, but there are ways that could be illegal. And do we have any idea, like, what this guy's party affiliation is or anything like that? He was once a registered Democrat, then he was registered unaffiliated, and he's now a registered Republican. But he has worked for both parties and races at various times. So what's McCrae Dallas been up to in North Carolina? How has he wrapped up in this election? What we know is Dallas was working as a sort of subcontractor for Mark Harris's campaign,

and he was working on get-out-the-vote efforts. Supposedly, according to these accounts, what they were doing was they were going around and they were collecting absentee ballots from people. So they would knock on your door and say, hey, you know, you've got a ballot, we'll take it in and deliver it. But it's against the law to do that in the state of North Carolina. And we also know that he requested an unusual number of absentee ballots, according to documents that the state board released, something like 500 ballots for other people, which is legal, but it's a little bit strange to see one person requesting that many ballots. How do you request ballots for people?

Like, is that something that's not out of the norm? I've never done that. You know, it's not inherently questionable. Someone might do a voter registration drive, and they might go around and collect a lot of names for people who would like absentee ballots. Then they'll go down to the county board of elections and request the ballots, and they'll be sent out to those voters. But it also could suggest some sort of questionable behavior. We just don't know for sure what it is. So is there an investigation right now into what

exactly he was doing? There's a couple things going on. The state board is investigating, and also a prosecutor in Wake County, which is where Raleigh, the state capital is, is also investigating. And we don't know if there are other investigations, but that's what we know of so far. Why are these investigations even happening? How did people get turned on to what he was doing? Well, there's a couple things going on. One is that North Carolina has really unusually transparent absentee voter public data. So you can see when ballots are being requested and where they're being requested,

where they're being sent, and whether people have turned them in. So people started to see some strange patterns going on. One is this high number of absentee ballot requests. Again, nothing nefarious inherently, but it was just a little bit unusual. Then we have these affidavits from people who say that workers were coming around,

allegedly working for Dallas and collecting their ballots. In October, Datisha Montgomery says a woman came to her home and knocked on the door asking for her absentee ballot. I told her, sure, I haven't filled it out. So she said, you can fill it out here. I filled out two names and she told me that the rest wasn't important and she would fill it out. I signed it and I didn't seal it. She said she would seal it herself. You have people who worked for Dallas who said that they were doing work like this, going around collecting ballots. Cheryl Kinlaw is one of the people he hired to collect the ballots. I feel bad now that I know that it wasn't legal, but at the time I didn't know. The other questionable thing is there are a lot of absentee ballots that were requested but unreturned in Bladen County and in a neighboring county, which, again, is not inherently nefarious,

but it's strange because the numbers are out of line with what you'd expect. The idea is some people think what might have happened is that in addition to potentially filling out ballots for people or changing votes, it's possible that workers could have gone around and destroyed ballots that were not for whoever was collecting them, wanted them to be for. Is there any evidence that McRae did something like that? Well, that's what some of these affidavits say. You know, you have people saying they were collecting these ballots, but they don't know what happened. They know they turned them into McRae Dallas, but they don't know what he did with them. We had seen him do it for years. So we just assumed it was perfectly okay to go around

and pick up the ballots. And then we just assumed he was turning them all in like it was supposed to be done. There's also sort of a history of this. Bladen County has a little bit of a reputation as sort of the Wild West in North Carolina politics. And when you talk to people around the state, there's a sort of, oh, man, Bladen. So I think when this happened, a lot of people in North Carolina were shocked by the scale, but not totally surprised that if something sketchy was going to happen, this is where it was going to happen. And in fact, I talked to the former executive director of the State Board of Elections, who left that role in 2013, I believe, and he said, we knew of strange

things going on in Bladen County for years. As this guy described it to me, what would happen is operatives would go around and they would find people who might not be the most savvy voters, so perhaps uneducated voters or elderly people in a home, and they'd go and request ballots for them. They would arrive, and then they would come knock on their doors and say, hey, I know you have an absentee ballot. Can I help you out filling that out? So this guy told me that they had referred cases to prosecutors in the past, but he didn't know if they'd ever been prosecuted, and he didn't think there'd ever been a case that had swung an election. Until now? We don't know for sure whether this changed the election, but I think the fact that there hasn't been a certification as a sign on the state board

is concerned it might be. It seems kind of weird if this guy, McCray Dallas, was out there collecting ballots and destroying them, like that just a lone wolf would go out there and try and swing an election? Is that what people suspect him of doing here? No, I mean, I think people suspect that there was some sort of coordination. The question is who knew and when they knew. So, you know, he's working as a subcontractor for Mark Harris, the Republican congressional candidate. Harris has been fairly tight lipped about this. You know, what he said is he wasn't aware that Dallas was doing anything questionable.

Although I was absolutely unaware of any wrongdoing, that will not prevent me from cooperating with this investigation. But you've got other people who say that Dallas's reputation was well-known. Everybody knew what this guy was doing. They knew he was dealing with strange amounts of cash, and that what he was doing was maybe on the fringes of the law. So the question is, did Mark Harris know anything about what Dallas was doing? He says no, but there are accusations that maybe he should have known or did know.

What do you think is going on here, David? We have a lot of affidavits that suggest that what was going on was some sort of political operation. And we have people who claim to be unaware. Mark Harris claims to be unaware. The people who were working for Dallas claim they were unaware what they were doing. He just said, hey, get these ballots and I'll give you money. And so they went out and did it. That just sounds so shady. You know, what's interesting is you have the voters who saw these people come around to collect their ballots and they assumed they were being paid by the county board of elections. Yeah. If ballots

are collected, that is illegal in and of itself. And it seems like there is something illegal. We just don't know whether it changed the election. Is anyone going to face repercussions for this? Dallas, people around him, Harris? I think it's clear that somebody will. And the question is what we get out of the state board. So one possibility is the state board comes back and they say, there's illegal behavior here, but we don't think it's enough to have changed the election.

And so we're going to certify the election results, but we're going to refer our results over to prosecutors for further investigation and possible prosecution. Or they could say, we didn't find any evidence of fraud, although that looks increasingly unlikely. But they could also decide that the election is so tainted that they're going to order a do-over, which would be pretty remarkable. Has anything like that ever happened before in North Carolina or anywhere else? In North Carolina, we've had do-overs for local races, but there's never been a congressional race that has been rerun this way. That would be unprecedented. So if someone finds a smoking gun here, we will be in uncharted territory, calling a congressperson back for a redo of the election.

Well, you know, it's a question whether he's a congressman because he hasn't been certified by the state board, which is the first authority that has to do it. The other thing is what the U.S. House will do. The House has the authority to decide who it wants to seat. And since there's Democratic control, they could theoretically say, we think this election is tainted and we're not going to seat Mark Harris until we are satisfied that there was not some sort of illegal behavior. And Steny Hoyer,

who's the incoming number two Democrat, says that he doesn't think Harris should probably be sat until they know out what happened in its 9th district, it's also trying to fix election fraud across the state. Just a totally different kind of fraud. That's next on Today Explained. Some time ago, I reached out to listeners at this point in the program and said something like,

you know, I've got this extra quip electric toothbrush on my desk. I don't really know what to do with it. Do you have any ideas? And a lot of people wrote to me with their ideas. And one idea that seemed to repeat itself several times was brush your dog's teeth with the Quip and see how the dog likes it. And I thought it was a great idea. Unfortunately, my dogs live in California, so I couldn't really do anything with that. I didn't have a dog sitting around. But I wonder if any of the Quip users out there do and have tried to brush their dog's teeth with the Quip. If you have, let me know. I'd love to hear more about it. Sean at Box.com. In the meantime, if you want to brush your dog's teeth with the quip, but don't yet have a quip, getquip.com slash explain. It's the holiday season. Give your dog a quip. David, how is the government responding to this scandal in North Carolina?

Well, there's a lot of outrage, but no one is quite sure what should be done. There's been a lot of focus on voter fraud in North Carolina, as well as in other places over the last few years. And, you know, efforts to change voting laws and institute photo ID laws to vote. And so you've got the two parties taking different tacks. Democrats say, look, this proves that Republicans have been focusing on totally the wrong thing for lo these many years. Republicans say, look, this proves that there's a problem of fraud.

We're the only ones taking it seriously and we need to deal with it. We hear from Republicans especially about voter fraud all the time, but it doesn't seem to like ever be about this particular kind of voter fraud. It's about people who don't have ID, voting twice, whatever it is.

You don't hear about some guy going around to like elderly disabled voters and stealing their ballots. Yeah. And this has been a big debate sort of on election Twitter. Election Twitter. Election Twitter. It's riveting, let me tell you. Okay. There's a debate about what to call this. Trump talks a lot about voter fraud. And what he means there is, you know, this idea that there are three to five million people who are casting votes illegally. So individuals are going out there and they are ruining the system. What these experts say is this isn't voter fraud. Voters didn't break any laws here. This is election fraud. In fact,

it was voters who were being defrauded, allegedly, by unscrupulous poll workers. And I think there's something to that argument. This isn't the voters who have allegedly broken the law. So how often does the kind of voter fraud that President Trump talks about usually happen? These sorts of things are really rare. There's been a lot of a search for years. And what you turn up with is, you know, usually a couple dozen cases at most in any given year.

For a couple reasons. One, it's not very effective. Voting twice only increases your vote by one. And also, it is potentially a serious violation of law, so people are unlikely to do it. Right, and election fraud, the thing that McCRae Dallas did in North Carolina's 9th, is that more common?

Well, we don't know how common it is, but we do know that it's more impactful. You know, having an organized ring like this could actually change an election, whereas a couple people voting twice may be a subversion of the law, but it's unlikely to change the result, except in very rare races.

So is North Carolina trying to do anything to stop this more impactful kind of election fraud? Not really, but sort of. Okay. I should back up a little. North Carolina passed a really strict voting law in 2013, which was right after the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder kind of gutted the Voting Rights Act. And that law did a bunch of things. It required photo ID to vote, and it shortened early voting, and it cut some registration programs.

And after a long court battle in 2016, a federal court of appeals ruled that the law was deliberately disenfranchising black voters and was unconstitutional, and they struck most of it down. It targeted African Americans, as the court noted, with almost surgical precision. Then this fall, Republicans in the General Assembly placed a measure on the ballot that asked voters to approve an amendment to the state constitution to require a photo ID to vote. Yeah. And that passed fairly handily. And as this story has been going on in Bladen County, legislators have been meeting in Raleigh, passing the new voter ID law that voters approve.

As they're doing this and they're down to the wire, this story breaks. And so they did a little bit to try to deal with absentee vote fraud and to make ways to concern with this. But it's mostly just focused on the in-person voter fraud that we were talking about that's so rare. Okay, so North Carolina is working hard to prevent voter fraud, introduce voter ID laws, even though that's not a real big problem.

That's right. All the while, a different kind of voter fraud might end up having, what, a vacant seat in the House of Representatives. Exactly. Well, darn it, David, that's confusing. Sometimes what goes on in legislatures doesn't totally reflect reality, it turns out. What if this weren't so partisan? What would that world look like? I think if you would ask Democrats about that, what they would say is, we absolutely think that elections need to be thorough and fair, but we also think that there

are laws on the books that already deal with this. What Republicans say typically is, if one vote is cast that is improper, that taints the election. And Democrats tend to approach it from the opposite view, which is, if one legitimate voter is turned away because the law is too strict, that's a sub of whether the most important thing is making sure as many people can vote as possible at the risk of potential fraud, or making sure that every voter is legitimate at the risk of shutting people out. And that's, I think, really what the debate comes down to. But I think it is a question of what your first principles are on this issue. David Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This to Today Explained and thanks to Quip Electric Toothbrushes for financially supporting the show.

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