Alan Blinder and Michael Wines

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. President Donald Trump, who has made election fraud one of the hallmarks of his administration, was quiet on Twitter, although on Friday, facing reporters at the Oval Office, he condemned fraud — “all of it, and that includes North Carolina.”

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 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.

In several hours of testimony Thursday, after his campaign acknowledged that it had withheld damning records from the board, Harris denied wrongdoing but also appeared to mislead regulators. He then surprised everyone by abandoning his claim to the 9th Congressional District seat, which covers part of Charlotte and much of southeastern North Carolina.

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 Dowless and some of the people he hired.

“Obviously, it’s within the province of the grand jury as to whether they will return indictments,” Freeman said. “But do I anticipate there will be a criminal prosecution going forward? I do.”

State Republicans, who over the past few years have tightened voting laws and had fought to preserve Harris’ 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.

On Friday, state Sen. Phil Berger, president pro tempore of the North Carolina Senate and among the most powerful Republicans in Raleigh, said Harris should have heeded warnings that Dowless could not be trusted.

“If you failed to take notice of the things that are there to see and the things that you’re hearing that are repeated by people that you ought to trust, I think you deserve a fair amount of criticism,” he said.

Berger, who said he had been surprised by Harris’ decision to ask the elections board to order a new election, did not say whether Harris should run again. (In an interview, McCready said Friday that he would run in the new election, which has not been scheduled.)

“I think there was enough going on to create questions, and the results were close enough where we just needed to clean this out and start over,” Berger said in an interview at the Legislative Building.

Berger, who helped craft a voter ID law that a federal appeals court later said contained provisions that targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision,” said he expected the 9th District case to lead to new discussions about how to combat fraud in North Carolina.

Among Harris’ supporters, Tami Fitzgerald, executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition, a group that works with pastors throughout the state and has close ties to Harris, would not say whether fraud had taken place in the 9th District. Instead, she called the board’s unanimous decision a “stolen victory.”

A congressional election has not been redone in more than 40 years, and doing so because of fraud is almost unheard of. But there have been ample causes for suspicion — Lyndon B. Johnson’s first Senate victory foremost among them — that illegal votes have been cast for candidates who won.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which organizes and finances the party’s House strategy, used the debacle in North Carolina to demand that Democrats support a national ban on the collection of absentee ballots — a practice that is legal in many states but not in North Carolina.

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 Dowless as early as January 2017, they took no action before November’s House election, and it is unclear whether they are investigating the matter.

In Oval Office remarks to reporters Friday, Trump condemned voter fraud throughout the country, falsely claiming “they found a million fraudulent votes” in California, and calling the 2018 vote count in Florida a “catastrophe” because vote totals for Republican candidates decreased during recounts.

But Trump said he looked forward to a final report on the disputed election in that state.

No one has been more vocal about the evils of rigged votes than Trump, who has repeatedly made the false claim that the 2016 election, in which he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, was rife with Democratic fraud.

And shortly before the midterms, when Democrats flipped the House, Trump said on Twitter that “all levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD.”

“Cheat at your own peril,” he warned.

The president’s obsession led him to create a presidential commission charged with reining in voter fraud. Led by the Kansas secretary of state at the time, Kris Kobach, the panel sought voter data from all 50 states in an effort to prove the president’s theory of massive illegal voting. But the commission was disbanded after election officials from both parties refused to hand over the data and critics filed multiple lawsuits challenging its conduct.

Kobach, who built his political career on thinly sourced allegations of unchecked illegal voting by noncitizens, said in an interview Friday that it “is never appropriate for either side of the political debate to be silent about voter fraud.”

“People who downplay it say it’s just a small percentage of the total vote, but that argument is meaningless in a close race,” he said.

In a column on Breitbart News, Kobach suggested that the case was a comeuppance for Democrats and voting-rights advocates who oppose the stringent controls on voting that Republicans have enacted for a decade or more. But those restrictions, limiting who can vote and how ballots are cast, only shield elections from cheating by individual voters, a kind of fraud that experts say is exceptionally rare.

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 9th District race. Absentee ballots are especially susceptible to manipulation.

On Friday, 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.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/us/republican-voter-fraud.html" id="3c8b1eae-d676-3feb-a5de-96eab5096c42">The New York Times</a>.

Republican Cries Against Voter Fraud Go Mostly Quiet After Scheme Tied to Party

RALEIGH, N.C. — 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.

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Alan Blinder and Michael Wines

Articles written by the author

Republican Cries Against Voter Fraud Go Mostly Quiet After Scheme Tied to Party