The GOP has become a sworn enemy of democracy...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/allegations-of-gop-election-fraud-shake-north-carolinas-ninth-district

Earlier this week, Montgomery’s complaint, along with four other sworn statements, and a sixth which was not notarized, were submitted to the North Carolina election board by a lawyer for the state’s Democratic Party. These affidavits, which were first reported by the Charlotte TV station WSOC, contain the following allegations: a woman going door to door saying “she was assigned to the district to collect absentee ballots”; one instance of an unrequested absentee ballot arriving at a voter’s house; “improper” election monitoring at a polling site; unusual “coding” on absentee ballots; and two men separately saying that they overheard people talking about payments to a local political operative working for the Republican candidate, Mark Harris. As of now, these anecdotes are, of course, purely allegations. But state officials have begun to explore whether these testimonies could help explain statistical irregularities in the absentee-vote count for the Ninth District, which had previously been called for Harris over his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by a margin of nine hundred and five votes (out of around two hundred and eighty thousand cast).

North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District begins in the Democratic suburbs of Charlotte, but the gerrymandered counterweight, which has kept the seat in Republican hands since 1963, is a rural Republican stronghold stretching east along the South Carolina state line. It is here, in Bladen County and the neighboring Robeson County, that the problems began. Steve Stone, the chairman of the Robeson County Board of Elections, told the Washington Post that election officials became concerned in August by people dropping off large numbers of registration forms and absentee-ballot requests. He said that county residents had also made reports of people going door to door, telling voters that their registrations had been dropped, that they needed to re-register, and that they should sign an absentee-ballot-request form. The large number of complaints prompted state investigators to seize completed absentee-ballot-request forms and envelopes from both counties in the days after the election.

On Tuesday, the state’s Board of Elections—made up of four Democrats, four Republicans, and one Independent—which tabulates and verifies every vote in the weeks after an election, shocked North Carolina’s political establishment by voting unanimously not to certify Harris’s win. “I’m very familiar with unfortunate activities that have been happening down in my part of the state,” Joshua Malcolm, the board’s vice-chairman and a Democratic resident of the Ninth District, said during the meeting. “I’m not going to turn a blind eye to what took place. To the best of my understanding, which has been ongoing for a number of years, that has been repeatedly referred to the United States Attorney and district attorneys to take action and clean it up.”

The board’s actions inspired J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics at Catawba College, near Charlotte, and a self-described “North Carolina politics data geek,” to reëxamine some of the voter returns. In Bladen and Robeson counties, Bitzer found that Harris won an unusually high share of mail-in absentee-ballot votes. Bladen was the only county where the Republican prevailed in the mail-in-absentee vote, winning sixty-one per cent of the votes from mail-in ballots—despite registered Republicans accounting for only nineteen per cent of the county’s returned absentee ballots. To achieve that margin, Harris would have needed to win not only all of the Republican ballots but almost every single mail-in vote from Independents, as well as a significant number of votes from crossover Democrats. Since posting his findings on his blog, Bitzer has been answering so many media calls that his voice has grown hoarse. “Now it feels more like an avalanche rather than the snowball effect,” he said. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”