GOP Cries Against Voter Fraud Go Silent in Face Of GOP Fraud

Mark Harris, the disgraced Republican candidate.

For years now Republicans have whined about almost non-existent "voter fraud" as a justification for voter ID laws and other restrictions on voting that are aimed at disenfranchising voters not-inclined for voting for Republican candidates. Instances of individuals illegally voting are rare, but as North Carolina's 9th congressional distract race has revealed, organized GOP efforts to commit voter fraud is not equally rare.  Indeed, the 2018 election results are being thrown out and a new election has been ordered.   And those GOP shrieks about voter fraud?  They are almost non-existent.  The GOP hypocrisy is stunning and seemingly parallels that of the GOP's evangelical base.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the deafening GOP silence.    Here are highlights:

Republican politicians across the country have for years railed against the threat of voter fraud. Some have made unproven claims about how rampant it has become in order to pass voter ID laws and open sweeping investigations. The sanctity of the vote, they have said, must be protected at all costs.

But when a hard-fought congressional election in North Carolina — in which a Republican candidate appeared to narrowly beat his Democratic opponent — was overturned this week because of election fraud by a Republican political operative, the party was measured, and largely muted, in its response.

The state party chairman, Robin Hayes, issued a statement after officials ordered a new election calling the affair “a tremendously difficult situation for all involved.” National Republicans have been mostly mum.

Mark Harris, the Republican nominee, had eked out a 905-vote lead over Dan McCready. But the North Carolina Board of Elections refused to certify Mr. Harris as the winner and opened an investigation into irregularities. This week, the five-member board, made up of Republicans and Democrats, convened an evidentiary hearing in Raleigh at which witnesses described a voter-turnout effort that relied on the rogue collection of absentee ballots.

Witnesses detailed how people working for a Harris campaign operative, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., had filled out parts of some absentee ballots and improperly collected others. On Friday, Lorrin Freeman, the district attorney in Wake County, said she could seek charges within weeks against Mr. Dowless and some of the people he hired.

State Republicans, who over the past few years have tightened voting laws and had fought to preserve Mr. Harris’s victory, were far less vociferous in denouncing voter fraud than they have been in the past.

That stands in marked contrast to 2016, when the state’s Republicans filed many complaints and claimed for a month that Roy Cooper, the Democrat who was elected governor that year, should not be seated because rampant fraud had enabled his victory. The charge proved baseless.

Among Mr. Harris’s supporters, Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition, a group that works with pastors throughout the state and has close ties to Mr. Harris, would not say whether fraud had taken place in the Ninth District. Instead, she called the board’s unanimous decision a “stolen victory.”
 Prosecutors in the Trump administration have been conducting a high-profile investigation in North Carolina for months to find noncitizens who cast illegal ballots, many of them in apparent ignorance of the law. But although the state elections board sent Justice Department officials evidence of absentee-ballot fraud by Mr. Dowless as early as January 2017, they took no action before last November’s House election, and it is unclear whether they are investigating the matter.
 The party has given scant attention to the more frequent kind of election fraud — the inside-job schemes in which campaigns or election officials manufacture fake votes and destroy their opponents’ real ones — that appears to have taken place in the Ninth District race. Absentee ballots are especially susceptible to manipulation.

On Friday, Mr. Berger, the Republican state senator, resisted suggestions that his party had ignored the fraud potential and noted that state law already banned the misconduct outlined at the hearing this week. But he said, “I think it’s clear that something needs to be done if there’s a reasonable thing that can be done.”

History Suggests Mark Herring May Prevail in Recount

With stories of missing votes in the Virginia Attorney General race such as the one in the Roanoke Times, Virginia sounds like some third world country.  The result is that it will probably be sometime in December before a confirmed winner is announced in the race.  Obviously, I am hoping that Mark Herring makes up the current deficit once provisional ballots and newly found ballots are fully counted.  As a piece in the Washington Post notes, history suggests that there is reason to hope that Mark Obenshain - a creepy Ken Cuccinelli clone - will go down to defeat in the end.  Here are highlights:

The Virginia attorney general’s race appears headed for a recount, with the latest results showing Republican Mark Obenshain leading Democrat Mark Herring by fewer than 800 votes out of about 2.2 million cast.

And according to a study by the group FairVote, Herring is currently well within the margin under which the race could flip in his favor.

The study shows the average statewide recount between 2000 and 2012 shifted the vote total by about 0.03 percent, with the largest shift being 0.11 percent.  According to the latest numbers, Obenshain’s lead over Herring is just more than 0.03 percent.

Now, it should be noted that the vote count will continue to shift as provisional and other ballots continue to be counted. But at this point, it seems a recount could indeed flip the contest to Herring . . . . .

Here are more details from the Roanoke Times piece cited above:

Fairfax County election officials focused on a faulty voting machine as the cause for an unusually low number of absentee ballots recorded in one of the county's voting districts.

The Fairfax County Electoral Board said it would meet Saturday to hear the results of an investigation into the apparent voting discrepancy and release the results of a canvass on Sunday.

Statewide, Republican state Sen. Mark D. Obenshain of Harrisonburg has a 1,272-vote lead over state Sen. Mark R. Herring, a Loudoun Democrat. But Herring won Fairfax County by a wide margin in Tuesday's election, 60 percent to 38 percent, and up to 2,000 votes could be up for grabs in the canvass.

Some 3,158 provisional ballots also remain to be certified statewide. Those ballots typically involve a voter who lacked an ID or voted in the wrong precinct. Local registrars have until Tuesday to certify those ballots, and the state has until Nov. 25. Either way the votes fall, each candidate is expected to seek a recount.

The combination of the unaccounted Fairfax County absentee ballots and the provisional ballots make it increasingly likely the successor to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli won't be known until the state certifies the vote later this month.