A history of electoral disputes in North and South Carolina | WFAE 90.7

A group of Republican congressmen this week tried to overturn the election results in a handful of states, using baseless allegations of fraud around the missing ballots.

His efforts did not include North Carolina because President Trump narrowly won the state.

But some of the issues cited in states like Pennsylvania about the expansion of missing postal ballots were also at stake in North Carolina. The 2020 fight over postal voting in North Carolina ended a years-long struggle over access to voting and allegations of fraud.

In “North Carolina, we are used to a significant number of elections being in the news and being in dispute,” said Michael Bitzer, professor of politics at Catawba College, citing regular legal challenges about federal and state redistricting.

A notable example is that of 1950. Hubert Davis was then the acting sheriff in rural Madison County, east of Asheville, and refused to step down after losing his re-election. According to this Charlotte Observer article, Davis only left after a two-month standoff with the courts.

In 2016, current Republican Pat McCrory narrowly lost his candidacy for a second term as governor by just over 10,000 votes for Democrat Roy Cooper.

McCrory’s campaign challenged the election several times, alleging fraud in about half of the state’s 100 counties.

Their complaints were dismissed.

One complaint focused on Durham’s heavily democratic county, where the votes posted late helped Cooper overtake McCrory in the current count.

It turns out that Durham’s electronic voting equipment stopped working on election morning, a problem that spread throughout the day and delayed the results. The state asked the federal government to investigate whether Russia or another foreign government hacked computers in the county elections. The federal government has not found such evidence.

Another of McCrory’s challenges focused on rural Bladen County. The campaign claimed that a group aligned with Democrats – the Bladen County Improvement PAC – was illegally helping voters to fill out ballots. During a state election council hearing on Bladen’s allegations, council members investigated not just the Bladen PAC – but another group that was working for Republicans, led by operative McCrae Dowless.

McCrory’s claims in Bladen were dismissed. Cooper became governor. And Bladen County would resurface again two years later – in one of the country’s biggest electoral fraud scandals.

The 2016 election came amid North Carolina’s long struggle to have a photo ID – an issue that has yet to be decided.

The State Electoral Council audited the 2016 general elections and concluded that an illegal vote would have been avoided with a photo identification law.

There were 508 ineligible votes in general out of about 4.5 million votes cast that year. The vast majority of these cases were of active criminals who voted before their full sentence was served.

US Attorney Robert J. Higdon has indicted 19 immigrants on charges of voting illegally or assisting with illegal voting in the 2016 elections, choosing only to prosecute some while others were fined.

2018: Bladen County is the center of the scandal

Two years later, in 2018, Republican Congressional candidate Mark Harris seemed to have narrowly defeated Democrat Dan McCready in 9^º District race.

But Joshua Malcom, a former member of the State Electoral Council, led an effort to delay certification of that result because of allegations of fraud in relation to missing ballots in Bladen and Robeson counties.

Dowless, the agent who worked for Harris, collected completed ballots in the mail, which is illegal in North Carolina. In some cases, the operatives themselves working for Dowless filled in incomplete votes. The state “found itself at the center of national attention” for a case of electoral fraud, according to Bitzer.

The council called for a new election, won by Republican Dan Bishop in 2019. Bishop became one of the most vociferous voices in the North Carolina Congressional delegation when he challenged the 2020 election, saying it was “rigged”.

After the Bladen County scandal, the General Assembly – with a bipartisan vote – approved some reforms. One change has been to ban people from collecting voter registration forms by mail absent from voters. This made it difficult for people to register large numbers of people for postal voting – the kind of operation that Dowless ran in Bladen.

But then the coronavirus pandemic came.

2020: The struggle for postal voting during a pandemic

Democrats sought to facilitate people’s voting by mail in the 2020 elections and talked about a series of changes. One was to allow third parties to collect the voting request forms by mail. Another was to allow third parties to collect filled out postal bills.

The Republican General Assembly rejected many of these proposals. But lawmakers approved some changes, including requiring only one witness to sign on the ballot papers, instead of two.

The issue seemed to be resolved. But the State Electoral Council – which has a Democratic majority – announced in the fall of 2020 that it was ending an action that sought to facilitate people’s voting by mail.

The council agreed to allow voters to cure certain deficiencies through a sworn statement, rather than filling out and sending out a substitute ballot. Republicans at the General Assembly criticized the deal and said the council was making changes to the healing process that only the state legislature could do. The agreement also extended the post-election day period, when absentee ballots sent by mail could reach polling stations from 6 to 12 November, as long as they were posted by 5 pm on election day.

Courts ended up having the final say on these issues, as they did in Pennsylvania and other states.

In the end, the ballots by mail were accepted until 12 November. But the signature requirement remained, which means that voters could not “cure” a ballot that did not have a witness’s signature, saying that the ballot was theirs and legitimate.

Absent Notes in South Carolina

Absentee ballots were also at issue in lawsuits filed in South Carolina. The state has stricter laws for who can use absentee ballots, but lawmakers relaxed the rules to allow residents to vote absent in 2020 for any reason because of the pandemic COVID-19. Lawmakers have not eliminated the requirement for a witness.

A federal lawsuit prompted a federal district judge in Charleston to overturn the requirement for a witness for the election. Between late September and early October, some South Carolinaians received materials with their absentee ballot saying that a witness’s signature was not necessary.

The proceeds of that action reached the United States Supreme Court, which reinstated the requirement for witnesses for ballots received two days after the decision. Complicating the decision was the fact that South Carolina law does not allow election officials to contact voters who sent absentee ballots with disabilities, such as the loss of a witness’s signature.

The South Carolina Election Commission, which conducts state elections, also found during a dispute with a coalition of voter interest groups that at least nine of the state’s 46 counties compared voters’ signatures on absent ballots before accepting them. The state had no law requiring signature matching, and executive director Marci Andino ordered all counties to stop the practice while processing absentee ballots.

Election Day 2020

The early vote in North Carolina also attracted its share of complaints. In Anson County, surveillance footage showed a man named John Montgomery accompanying voters inside the polling place. Montgomery is the husband of a Democratic candidate for the county’s Stock Registry.

His actions resulted in nearly 30 complaints to the Anson County Electoral Council for alleged voter interference. State electoral law states that voters must ask the chief judge, who commands the operations of each district, for help. The State Electoral Board said it is still investigating the allegations. Republican Congressman Bishop shared the footage on social media, saying “Anson County early voting is being conducted by gangsters.”

After election day, the outcome of the presidential election in North Carolina was close – President Trump led by 1.3% over Joe Biden – and was not subject to unfounded legal challenges like those that the Trump campaign presented in other states battle. The closest state disputes were the judicial ones, including for the president of the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

Justice President Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, initially supported Republican challenger Paul Newby, a senior associate judge at the court, on election night.

The two exchanged clues in the nine days after November 3, while county ballots processed ballots by mail and provisional ballots. Similar to the 2016 governor race, Beasley and Newby sent challenges from voters in dozens of counties to disqualify certain absentee ballots or include others that the county’s electoral boards found deficient or backward. Beasley requested two recounts, none of which changed Newby’s leadership by more than a few votes.

After a second recount of some ballots, Newby led by 401 votes and Beasley conceded the race.

The 2020 North Carolina election formally ended with a vote to certify the final results. On November 24, the North Carolina State Election Council met to review the election data and vote on certification for all but the few that were still recounting, including the dispute over the president of the court.

Certification is usually a superficial and unanimous vote, but the council has had its first dissent in at least a quarter of a century. Republican council member Tommy Tucker, newly appointed after two previous Republicans resigned following the state council’s agreement, voted not to certify the results. He reiterated the arguments of other Republican state legislators, saying that only the General Assembly could change the way absent ballots were cured and that the State Elections Council acted inappropriately in resolving the process.