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Why Dems Love Mail In Voting...

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  • #61
    Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
    Continuing to pretend that you have not received an answer on more than one occasion is incredibly dishonest shuny.
    Your still ignoring the fact that the subject of the thread concerning mail-in balloting and Republican states.
    Last edited by shunyadragon; 07-06-2020, 06:42 AM.
    Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
    Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
    But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

    go with the flow the river knows . . .

    Frank

    I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

    Comment


    • #62
      Originally posted by Bill the Cat View Post
      No. ONE jackass took it upon himself to act like a jackass. The Republicans in Columbus County had nothing to do with him.
      It was Republicans that were responsible for the voter fraud in Columbus County, Robeson and Bladen Counties North Carolina.

      https://www.wect.com/2019/05/02/elec...lumbus-county/

      Your still ignoring the fact that the subject of the thread concerning mail-in balloting and Republican states.
      Last edited by shunyadragon; 07-06-2020, 06:49 AM.
      Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
      Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
      But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

      go with the flow the river knows . . .

      Frank

      I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

      Comment


      • #63
        Originally posted by shunyadragon View Post
        It was Republicans that were responsible for the voter fraud in Columbus County, Robeson and Bladen Counties North Carolina.

        https://www.wect.com/2019/05/02/elec...lumbus-county/
        No it wasn't. It was McCrae Dowless. Not "The Republicans".

        Your still ignoring the fact that the subject of the thread concerning mail-in balloting and Republican states.
        "You're".
        That's what
        - She

        Without a clear-cut definition of sin, morality becomes a mere argument over the best way to train animals
        - Manya the Holy Szin (The Quintara Marathon)

        I may not be as old as dirt, but me and dirt are starting to have an awful lot in common
        - Stephen R. Donaldson

        Comment


        • #64
          You wonder how many they are not catching...

          Vanderburgh Co. Woman Facing Election Fraud Charges

          A Vanderburgh County woman is facing a Level 6 felony charge for allegedly sending out fraudulent absentee ballot applications that already had the Democratic Party box checked.

          According to the Vanderburgh County Clerk Carla Hayden, hundreds of absentee ballot applications mailed out sometime between April and May already had the Democratic Party box checked. Hayden said even after being asked to stop by the elections office, the individual continued sending them out.

          In all, the election board ended up rejecting more than 400 applications already marked “Democratic Party,” allegedly sent out by Reed
          .

          https://44news.wevv.com/vanderburgh-...fraud-charges/
          Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

          Comment


          • #65
            Originally posted by seer View Post
            You wonder how many they are not catching...

            Vanderburgh Co. Woman Facing Election Fraud Charges

            A Vanderburgh County woman is facing a Level 6 felony charge for allegedly sending out fraudulent absentee ballot applications that already had the Democratic Party box checked.

            According to the Vanderburgh County Clerk Carla Hayden, hundreds of absentee ballot applications mailed out sometime between April and May already had the Democratic Party box checked. Hayden said even after being asked to stop by the elections office, the individual continued sending them out.

            In all, the election board ended up rejecting more than 400 applications already marked “Democratic Party,” allegedly sent out by Reed
            .

            https://44news.wevv.com/vanderburgh-...fraud-charges/
            According to the Vanderburgh County Clerk Carla Hayden, hundreds of absentee ballot applications mailed out sometime between April and May already had the Democratic Party box checked. Hayden said even after being asked to stop by the elections office, the individual continued sending them out.
            That's a special level of stupid. If Dems are that dumb, maybe we won't have to worry about it after all.

            Comment


            • #66
              Originally posted by Bill the Cat View Post
              No it wasn't. It was McCrae Dowless. Not "The Republicans".
              It was not only McCrae Dowless, such wide spread misuse of absentee ballots over three counties was not the product of one man. He had a crew in three counties including Lisa Brit, and hired by the Republican campaign for Mark Harris, who withdrew because of conflicting testimony concerning the election fraud and the Republican Party.

              Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/us/mark-harris-nc-voter-fraud.html



              RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina officials on Thursday ordered a new contest in the Ninth Congressional District after the Republican candidate, confronted by evidence that his campaign had financed an illegal voter-turnout effort, called for a new election.

              The unanimous ruling by the five-member Board of Elections was a startling — and, for Republicans, embarrassing — conclusion to a case that has convulsed North Carolina since November.

              And it followed testimony that outlined how a political operative had orchestrated an absentee ballot scheme to try to sway the race in favor of Mark Harris, the Republican candidate. It is now the single undecided House contest in last year’s midterms.

              Robert Cordle, the state board’s chairman, cited “the corruption, the absolute mess with the absentee ballots” when he called for a new election. “It was certainly a tainted election,” he said.

              Mr. Harris had a 905-vote lead over his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, but his success in Bladen County — where he won 61 percent of absentee ballots even though Republicans there accounted for just 19 percent of them — alarmed regulators.

              When he finally took the stand Thursday morning, Mr. Harris denied knowing of any wrongdoing in the voter-turnout effort led by L. McCrae Dowless Jr., a veteran political operative known as a local “guru of elections.”

              But in a series of questions, Mr. Harris stumbled and appeared to mislead the board. When he returned to the crowded courtroom after a lunch recess, he asked whether he could read a statement. He apologized to the board and explained that recent medical issues, including two strokes, had impaired his abilities and recall.

              And then he asked for a new election.

              “It’s become clear to me that the public’s confidence in the Ninth District’s general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted,” Mr. Harris said to audible gasps.

              Mr. Harris’s surprise announcement represented an abrupt collapse of the Republican effort to stave off a new vote in the Ninth, which includes part of Charlotte and runs through much of southeastern North Carolina.

              His political surrender came after a damaging 24 hours for him and his supporters. He acknowledged that some of his testimony on Thursday morning had been “incorrect.” Hours earlier, state officials had accused the Harris campaign of withholding incriminating records that were subpoenaed months ago.

              The board’s decision will leave the Ninth District without representation in Congress for at least several months. It was not clear whether Mr. Harris would run in the new election, which has not been scheduled.

              Mr. McCready said, “Today was a great step forward for democracy in North Carolina.”

              “From the moment the first vote was stolen in North Carolina, from the moment the first voice was silenced by election fraud, the people have deserved justice,” he said.

              Robin Hayes, the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, said the party supported Mr. Harris’s decision “on behalf of the voters.”

              The Ninth District controversy ranks among the highest-profile examples of modern election fraud, and also underscores how absentee ballots remain susceptible to abuse.

              Witnesses this week have described an enterprise that was rife with misconduct, including the collection and completion of absentee ballots. Witnesses said that both actions, which are illegal in North Carolina, had occurred repeatedly.

              © Copyright Original Source

              Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
              Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
              But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

              go with the flow the river knows . . .

              Frank

              I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

              Comment


              • #67
                Originally posted by shunyadragon View Post
                It was not only McCrae Dowless, such wide spread misuse of absentee ballots over three counties was not the product of one man. He had a crew in three counties including Lisa Brit, and hired by the Republican campaign for Mark Harris, who withdrew because of conflicting testimony concerning the election fraud and the Republican Party.
                Harris had no idea that Dowless was stuffing ballots, nor was there any evidence provided during the trial that proved he did. Therefore, I stand by my claim that it was not "the Republicans".
                That's what
                - She

                Without a clear-cut definition of sin, morality becomes a mere argument over the best way to train animals
                - Manya the Holy Szin (The Quintara Marathon)

                I may not be as old as dirt, but me and dirt are starting to have an awful lot in common
                - Stephen R. Donaldson

                Comment


                • #68
                  Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
                  To large extent it is, isn't it?
                  Apparently not.

                  Comment


                  • #69
                    I think democrats love mail in voting because it allows more people to vote. Democrats don’t need to cheat to win 2020, they need as many people voting as possible.

                    While both sides are undoubtedly supporting whatever position that helps them politically, it’s unfortunate that the politically favourable position for the republicans here is voter suppression.

                    Comment


                    • #70
                      Originally posted by Bill the Cat View Post
                      Harris had no idea that Dowless was stuffing ballots, nor was there any evidence provided during the trial that proved he did. Therefore, I stand by my claim that it was not "the Republicans".
                      Selective reading ignores that many people were involved in three counties, and the testimony in the hearing reveled many inconsistency, and Mark Harris could not remember, get things straight nor give account of the conflicts in the testimony, and would not run again..

                      By the evidence the Republicans actually lied to dodge responsibility. Taking the Schultz approach, "I know nothing" indicate either total incompetence or neck deep in election fraud.

                      Yrs, the Republicans are most definitely involved.

                      From the Testimony at the hearing:

                      Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-tearful-drama-of-north-carolinas-election-fraud-hearings



                      Over the next two days, Andy Yates, who effectively ran Harris’s campaign through his political consultancy, Red Dome, spent eight hours on the stand. Later, Harris testified that he had expected Yates to provide oversight of Dowless. Yates said that his background check on Dowless consisted of a Google search and a cursory look at CourtRecords.org, which revealed three misdemeanor charges, including “assault on a female.” (Dowless also has a felony fraud conviction.) According to Yates, this was not a concern because Harris, who had already settled on the hire, had alerted him that Dowless had charges “related to a divorce.” Yates said that Dowless also assured him that his absentee-ballot program was legal. During the campaign, Yates paid Dowless more than a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, including a monthly fee that rose to more than sixteen hundred dollars, and around two dollars and fifty cents for each mail-in ballot collected by one of Dowless’s workers. Yates never asked to see any receipts. “If his word was good enough for Dr. Harris,” Yates said, “it was good enough for me.”

                      At the close of Yates’s testimony, Kim Strach, the director of the North Carolina Board of Elections, asked if Yates had any recollection of someone warning him about Dowless. When he said that he did not, she pressed him. “I just want to ask you,” she said, “do you recall having a phone conversation with Dr. Harris’s son, John Harris?” Yates, who appeared surprised, denied being warned by John Harris about Dowless. “If that conversation happened,” he said, “I do not recall it happening.” Strach could barely suppress a smile. “O.K.,” she said. “That’s all I have.”

                      Ever since the scandal broke, in late November, 2018, Harris’s son, John, a twenty-nine-year-old federal prosecutor in Raleigh, had restricted contact with his father, speaking to him only at holiday gatherings and after Harris was hospitalized for a severe infection, in early 2019. Around 11 o’clock on the evening after Yates’s testimony, John’s younger brother Matthew told his father that John would be testifying the next day—“I don’t want you to be shocked,” Harris later recalled Matthew saying. In fact, during the first two days of testimony, John had been sequestered in a room separate from most of the other witnesses. Moments before he was sworn in, on the third day, the lawyers for Harris’s campaign frantically attempted to submit additional evidence: e-mail correspondence between John and his father spanning the previous two years. Josh Lawson, the general counsel for the Board of Elections, initially refused the offer; it quickly became clear that the state already had access to them.

                      “I thought what [Dowless] was doing was illegal, and I was right,” John said during his testimony. Dowless, he added, had told his parents and other campaign associates that “he wasn’t doing any of this, and they believed him.” Seated near the front of the room, about twenty-five feet away from his son, Harris placed three fingers over his mouth and silently wept.

                      According to the e-mails and John’s subsequent testimony, Harris first became aware of Dowless in June of 2016, during his first run for the Ninth District seat. On the night of the primary election, John returned home from the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., where he then worked as a law clerk, to watch the returns on the Board of Elections’ Web site. John testified that when Robert Pittenger won by a hundred and thirty-four votes, the margin was so slim that he began poring over voting data, looking for anything that might spur a recount for his father. Soon he discovered an anomaly in the mail-in ballots in Bladen County: Todd Johnson had won two hundred and fourteen, Harris had scored four, and Pittenger had got zero. At 11:04 p.m., he sent an e-mail to his father noting that “this smacks of something gone awry.”


                      Initially, John thought that it “was an error in the counting machine,” but, as he kept digging, he noticed that absentee ballots had arrived in batches, as if someone were collecting and delivering them all at once. John recalled that he and his father soon became aware through a campaign staffer that Johnson had “someone in Bladen focussed on absentee ballots.” John suggested that his father discuss the situation with his lawyers. But, after Harris lost the recount, he no longer saw any point in pursuing the case.

                      Still, the experience stayed with him. That year, Dowless was elected as the county’s water-quality supervisor, despite the oppositional efforts of a Bladen County Democratic political-action committee. After the election, Dowless accused the group of running an absentee-ballot scam to defeat him. The case, which became a touchstone for Republican claims of widespread Democratic voter fraud, was cited by President Trump as proof that Hillary Clinton’s victory in the popular vote was illegitimate. On November 15th, Harris forwarded to John a Republican fund-raising e-mail with the subject line “urgent: Democratic Voting Fraud Scheme Uncovered.” “Amen!” Harris wrote to his son, noting that “the guy who made the claim”—Dowless—“is the same guy that Johnson paid to run the ‘absentee ballot program’ for him. Guess he didn’t like the Dems cutting into his business!”

                      At a hearing in late 2016, as “This American Life” previously reported, the Board of Elections, which found no evidence of Democratic wrongdoing, dismissed Dowless’s accusations, but not before Dowless admitted under oath that he had, in fact, paid workers to collect ballots for him. As it became clear that Dowless was detailing his involvement in a violation of federal election laws, he took the Fifth, which resulted in the state launching a criminal investigation. A few months later, as Harris prepared another run in the Ninth District, he actively began courting Dowless. On March 8, 2017, Harris text messaged a prominent Republican judge in the Bladen County area, asking for an introduction to “the guy whose absentee ballot project for Johnson could have put me in the US House this term, had I known, and he had been helping us.”

                      About a month later, Harris met with Dowless and a group of local Republican power brokers in the showroom of a furniture store. Harris later testified that Dowless described a legal absentee-ballot turnout program in which he paid workers to help voters request absentee ballots, and then followed up to encourage them to mail in votes for candidates he supported. However, something about the pitch prompted a call between Harris and his son John later that day to discuss the legality of Dowless’s efforts. The next morning, John sent an e-mail to Harris about the relevant election-law statute, which held that it was a Class I felony for anyone other than an election official to collect voters’ ballots. “The key thing that I am fairly certain they do that is illegal is that they collect the completed absentee ballots and mail them all at once,” John wrote during the exchange. “But if they simply leave the ballot with the voter and say be sure to mail this in, then that’s not illegal.” In a subsequent e-mail, he offered a final warning, writing, “Good test is if you’re comfortable with the full process he uses being broadcast on the news.”

                      Within a few weeks, Harris had made his decision. He wrote two personal checks for more than thirty-three hundred dollars to Dowless’s political-action committee. At the hearing, Strach would later ask Harris if he had understood that it was illegal for campaigns to coördinate with pacs that are set up for independent spending. Harris said that he did not.

                      John’s fears, of course, proved prophetic. Toward the end of his testimony, shaken with emotion, he said, “I love my dad and I love my mom, O.K.? I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle. I think that they made mistakes in this process.” John, who has two young children, added, “I’ve thought a lot more probably about my own little ones than my parents, and the world we’re building for them.” He closed with a plea for less partisanship in politics. “I’m just left thinking that we can all do a lot better than this,” he said. Then, without looking at his father, he stood, buttoned his suit coat, and walked out.

                      As the fourth day of the hearings opened, John Branch, the lawyer for Harris’s campaign, stood before the Board of Election to explain why, on the evening after his team had been shown to be withholding John Harris’s e-mails, he had produced an additional eight hundred pages of documents. “I’m here to own that,” Branch said. The previous day, Harris’s lawyers had claimed that they had not turned over the e-mails because of a search-term error. Now, during his cross-examination, Branch explained that he had not asked Harris’s senior staff to turn over significant amounts of potential evidence under the theory that they were technically contractors for Red Dome, Yates’s political consultancy. Branch claimed that the evidence was therefore outside the scope of the subpoena issued to the Harris campaign. But, as Election Board officials noted, John’s e-mails with his father almost certainly fell within the remit of a subpoena issued in December, 2018. “[John Harris] sat up here yesterday as an example of what attorneys should be,” T. Jeff Carmon III, a Democratic board member, said. “I think it’s a disgrace to our profession that the document wasn’t submitted to the board through the counsel.”

                      A few hours later, Mark Harris took the stand. He again explained that he had thought that Dowless’s efforts on his behalf had not included any illegal activities. When asked why he had not heeded his son’s advice, Harris said, “I thought he was overreacting.” John, he added, had only been analyzing the data from afar. “My son was still my son—twenty-seven years old,” he said. Harris suggested that Dowless’s support from Bladen G.O.P. officials was more persuasive, and he assumed it was Dowless’s personal relationships with voters that allowed him to be so successful gathering absentee ballots. Following his son’s testimony the previous day, Harris said, he had called John to say he was proud of him. He loved him, he said, but “I know he’s a little judgmental, and has a little taste of arrogance.”

                      Just before lunch, Lawson, the Board of Elections’ counsel, asked Harris, “Did you prepare to testify about the e-mails that your son addressed yesterday?” Harris evaded multiple versions of the question. Lawson pressed, “So did you tell anyone in this past week that you believe that those documents were not part of the evidence in this case?” Harris repeatedly answered that he did not recall doing so. But unbeknownst to Harris and his team, Lawson had received a phone call earlier that morning from someone who indicated that Harris, as recently as the night before John’s testimony, had said that he did not expect the e-mails between him and his son to be entered as evidence. Lawson now ceded the floor, and Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic lawyer who represented McCready, opened his cross-examination with a similar line of questioning, confirming, among other things, that Harris understood that he was under oath. Harris’s personal lawyer, David Freedman, abruptly broke in—something he had never done in more than three decades of practicing law—and asked for a recess. Under ethics rules, Freedman had to halt testimony if he believed that Harris might be lying under oath.

                      © Copyright Original Source

                      Last edited by shunyadragon; 07-07-2020, 11:34 AM.
                      Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
                      Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
                      But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

                      go with the flow the river knows . . .

                      Frank

                      I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

                      Comment


                      • #71
                        Originally posted by shunyadragon View Post
                        Selective reading ignores that many people were involved in three counties, and the testimony in the hearing reveled many inconsistency, and Mark Harris could not remember, get things straight nor give account of the conflicts in the testimony, and would not run again..

                        By the evidence the Republicans actually lied to dodge responsibility. Taking the Schultz approach, "I know nothing" indicate either total incompetence or neck deep in election fraud.

                        Yrs, the Republicans are most definitely involved.

                        From the Testimony at the hearing:

                        Source: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-tearful-drama-of-north-carolinas-election-fraud-hearings



                        Over the next two days, Andy Yates, who effectively ran Harris’s campaign through his political consultancy, Red Dome, spent eight hours on the stand. Later, Harris testified that he had expected Yates to provide oversight of Dowless. Yates said that his background check on Dowless consisted of a Google search and a cursory look at CourtRecords.org, which revealed three misdemeanor charges, including “assault on a female.” (Dowless also has a felony fraud conviction.) According to Yates, this was not a concern because Harris, who had already settled on the hire, had alerted him that Dowless had charges “related to a divorce.” Yates said that Dowless also assured him that his absentee-ballot program was legal. During the campaign, Yates paid Dowless more than a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, including a monthly fee that rose to more than sixteen hundred dollars, and around two dollars and fifty cents for each mail-in ballot collected by one of Dowless’s workers. Yates never asked to see any receipts. “If his word was good enough for Dr. Harris,” Yates said, “it was good enough for me.”

                        At the close of Yates’s testimony, Kim Strach, the director of the North Carolina Board of Elections, asked if Yates had any recollection of someone warning him about Dowless. When he said that he did not, she pressed him. “I just want to ask you,” she said, “do you recall having a phone conversation with Dr. Harris’s son, John Harris?” Yates, who appeared surprised, denied being warned by John Harris about Dowless. “If that conversation happened,” he said, “I do not recall it happening.” Strach could barely suppress a smile. “O.K.,” she said. “That’s all I have.”

                        Ever since the scandal broke, in late November, 2018, Harris’s son, John, a twenty-nine-year-old federal prosecutor in Raleigh, had restricted contact with his father, speaking to him only at holiday gatherings and after Harris was hospitalized for a severe infection, in early 2019. Around 11 o’clock on the evening after Yates’s testimony, John’s younger brother Matthew told his father that John would be testifying the next day—“I don’t want you to be shocked,” Harris later recalled Matthew saying. In fact, during the first two days of testimony, John had been sequestered in a room separate from most of the other witnesses. Moments before he was sworn in, on the third day, the lawyers for Harris’s campaign frantically attempted to submit additional evidence: e-mail correspondence between John and his father spanning the previous two years. Josh Lawson, the general counsel for the Board of Elections, initially refused the offer; it quickly became clear that the state already had access to them.

                        “I thought what [Dowless] was doing was illegal, and I was right,” John said during his testimony. Dowless, he added, had told his parents and other campaign associates that “he wasn’t doing any of this, and they believed him.” Seated near the front of the room, about twenty-five feet away from his son, Harris placed three fingers over his mouth and silently wept.

                        According to the e-mails and John’s subsequent testimony, Harris first became aware of Dowless in June of 2016, during his first run for the Ninth District seat. On the night of the primary election, John returned home from the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., where he then worked as a law clerk, to watch the returns on the Board of Elections’ Web site. John testified that when Robert Pittenger won by a hundred and thirty-four votes, the margin was so slim that he began poring over voting data, looking for anything that might spur a recount for his father. Soon he discovered an anomaly in the mail-in ballots in Bladen County: Todd Johnson had won two hundred and fourteen, Harris had scored four, and Pittenger had got zero. At 11:04 p.m., he sent an e-mail to his father noting that “this smacks of something gone awry.”


                        Initially, John thought that it “was an error in the counting machine,” but, as he kept digging, he noticed that absentee ballots had arrived in batches, as if someone were collecting and delivering them all at once. John recalled that he and his father soon became aware through a campaign staffer that Johnson had “someone in Bladen focussed on absentee ballots.” John suggested that his father discuss the situation with his lawyers. But, after Harris lost the recount, he no longer saw any point in pursuing the case.

                        Still, the experience stayed with him. That year, Dowless was elected as the county’s water-quality supervisor, despite the oppositional efforts of a Bladen County Democratic political-action committee. After the election, Dowless accused the group of running an absentee-ballot scam to defeat him. The case, which became a touchstone for Republican claims of widespread Democratic voter fraud, was cited by President Trump as proof that Hillary Clinton’s victory in the popular vote was illegitimate. On November 15th, Harris forwarded to John a Republican fund-raising e-mail with the subject line “urgent: Democratic Voting Fraud Scheme Uncovered.” “Amen!” Harris wrote to his son, noting that “the guy who made the claim”—Dowless—“is the same guy that Johnson paid to run the ‘absentee ballot program’ for him. Guess he didn’t like the Dems cutting into his business!”

                        At a hearing in late 2016, as “This American Life” previously reported, the Board of Elections, which found no evidence of Democratic wrongdoing, dismissed Dowless’s accusations, but not before Dowless admitted under oath that he had, in fact, paid workers to collect ballots for him. As it became clear that Dowless was detailing his involvement in a violation of federal election laws, he took the Fifth, which resulted in the state launching a criminal investigation. A few months later, as Harris prepared another run in the Ninth District, he actively began courting Dowless. On March 8, 2017, Harris text messaged a prominent Republican judge in the Bladen County area, asking for an introduction to “the guy whose absentee ballot project for Johnson could have put me in the US House this term, had I known, and he had been helping us.”

                        About a month later, Harris met with Dowless and a group of local Republican power brokers in the showroom of a furniture store. Harris later testified that Dowless described a legal absentee-ballot turnout program in which he paid workers to help voters request absentee ballots, and then followed up to encourage them to mail in votes for candidates he supported. However, something about the pitch prompted a call between Harris and his son John later that day to discuss the legality of Dowless’s efforts. The next morning, John sent an e-mail to Harris about the relevant election-law statute, which held that it was a Class I felony for anyone other than an election official to collect voters’ ballots. “The key thing that I am fairly certain they do that is illegal is that they collect the completed absentee ballots and mail them all at once,” John wrote during the exchange. “But if they simply leave the ballot with the voter and say be sure to mail this in, then that’s not illegal.” In a subsequent e-mail, he offered a final warning, writing, “Good test is if you’re comfortable with the full process he uses being broadcast on the news.”

                        Within a few weeks, Harris had made his decision. He wrote two personal checks for more than thirty-three hundred dollars to Dowless’s political-action committee. At the hearing, Strach would later ask Harris if he had understood that it was illegal for campaigns to coördinate with pacs that are set up for independent spending. Harris said that he did not.

                        John’s fears, of course, proved prophetic. Toward the end of his testimony, shaken with emotion, he said, “I love my dad and I love my mom, O.K.? I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle. I think that they made mistakes in this process.” John, who has two young children, added, “I’ve thought a lot more probably about my own little ones than my parents, and the world we’re building for them.” He closed with a plea for less partisanship in politics. “I’m just left thinking that we can all do a lot better than this,” he said. Then, without looking at his father, he stood, buttoned his suit coat, and walked out.

                        As the fourth day of the hearings opened, John Branch, the lawyer for Harris’s campaign, stood before the Board of Election to explain why, on the evening after his team had been shown to be withholding John Harris’s e-mails, he had produced an additional eight hundred pages of documents. “I’m here to own that,” Branch said. The previous day, Harris’s lawyers had claimed that they had not turned over the e-mails because of a search-term error. Now, during his cross-examination, Branch explained that he had not asked Harris’s senior staff to turn over significant amounts of potential evidence under the theory that they were technically contractors for Red Dome, Yates’s political consultancy. Branch claimed that the evidence was therefore outside the scope of the subpoena issued to the Harris campaign. But, as Election Board officials noted, John’s e-mails with his father almost certainly fell within the remit of a subpoena issued in December, 2018. “[John Harris] sat up here yesterday as an example of what attorneys should be,” T. Jeff Carmon III, a Democratic board member, said. “I think it’s a disgrace to our profession that the document wasn’t submitted to the board through the counsel.”

                        A few hours later, Mark Harris took the stand. He again explained that he had thought that Dowless’s efforts on his behalf had not included any illegal activities. When asked why he had not heeded his son’s advice, Harris said, “I thought he was overreacting.” John, he added, had only been analyzing the data from afar. “My son was still my son—twenty-seven years old,” he said. Harris suggested that Dowless’s support from Bladen G.O.P. officials was more persuasive, and he assumed it was Dowless’s personal relationships with voters that allowed him to be so successful gathering absentee ballots. Following his son’s testimony the previous day, Harris said, he had called John to say he was proud of him. He loved him, he said, but “I know he’s a little judgmental, and has a little taste of arrogance.”

                        Just before lunch, Lawson, the Board of Elections’ counsel, asked Harris, “Did you prepare to testify about the e-mails that your son addressed yesterday?” Harris evaded multiple versions of the question. Lawson pressed, “So did you tell anyone in this past week that you believe that those documents were not part of the evidence in this case?” Harris repeatedly answered that he did not recall doing so. But unbeknownst to Harris and his team, Lawson had received a phone call earlier that morning from someone who indicated that Harris, as recently as the night before John’s testimony, had said that he did not expect the e-mails between him and his son to be entered as evidence. Lawson now ceded the floor, and Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic lawyer who represented McCready, opened his cross-examination with a similar line of questioning, confirming, among other things, that Harris understood that he was under oath. Harris’s personal lawyer, David Freedman, abruptly broke in—something he had never done in more than three decades of practicing law—and asked for a recess. Under ethics rules, Freedman had to halt testimony if he believed that Harris might be lying under oath.

                        © Copyright Original Source

                        LOTS of reading between the lines there by the New Yorker...
                        That's what
                        - She

                        Without a clear-cut definition of sin, morality becomes a mere argument over the best way to train animals
                        - Manya the Holy Szin (The Quintara Marathon)

                        I may not be as old as dirt, but me and dirt are starting to have an awful lot in common
                        - Stephen R. Donaldson

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