CHARLOTTE – When State Board of Elections voted to delay certification of the 9th Congressional District results, one Democratic member, Joshua Malcolm (now the chairman), hinted that “unfortunate activities” had been going on in his part of the state for a long time. He even said he would “no longer turn a blind eye” to said activities.
We wondered what, and for how long, Malcolm was turning blind eyes to? Judging by the reporting of WBTV’s Nick Ochsner in Charlotte, the State Board of Elections was shrugging off evidence of fraud. It took a Republican being on the hot seat for the Board to actually take things seriously. A textbook double standard, to be sure.
“Documents obtained by WBTV show elections officials in Bladen County reported irregularities with absentee ballots in the 2010 election, years before similar concerns came to light in 2016 and in recent weeks following the 2018 race.
The North Carolina State Board of Elections has twice voted to not certify the results of the 9th Congressional District race—in which Republican Mark Harris beat Dan McCready by less than 1,000 votes—over ballot irregularities in portions of the district, including Bladen County.
Specifically, investigators with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the NCSBE are probing allegations of impropriety surrounding efforts to promote and collect absentee ballots from voters.
WBTV has identified at least three coordinated efforts surrounding absentee ballots conducted in 2018.
Questions surrounding absentee ballots were the subject of a complaint in 2016 filed by attorneys for then-Governor Pat McCrory, who pointed to the issues in questioning his re-election loss to Roy Cooper.
But WBTV has learned elections officials in Bladen County had sent information regarding questionable absentee ballots six years before that.[…]”
It looks like the Board has some explaining to do about its negligence in how it treated previous allegations of fraud.
Read more about the different set of standards the Board applied to such complaints in recent years here.
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