Election Fraud Scandal in North Carolina

The state Elections Board has refused to certify the results of Republican Mark Harris's slim win while it investigates allegations of election fraud. Republican State Senator Tommy Tucker says this isn't the first time something like this has happened in North Carolina. The Blatant County has had a long history of absentee ballot fraud, even in both parties. So we are being once again embarrassed in this state that our elections don't count. Joining me is one of the foremost

election law experts in the country, Rick Hassan. He's professor at the University of California Irvine School of Law and founder of the Election Law blog. So Rick explain what the allegations of election fraud are here. Well, they seem to involve absentee ballots UH in at least one county Blatant County, and maybe in more counties than that, and

they seem to involve two kinds of activities. One is collecting absentee ballots from people who may or may not have requested themselves, but for whom there was a request, and then filling those out if they were blank for the candidate Mark Harris, who has declared the winner of the election. And the other is that they were collected from some people and potentially destroyed if they were marked

for UH McCready, the candidate on the other side. And while there's about a nine vote difference between the two candidates UH, it is possible that there was enough activity UH related to UM either filling in ballots or destroying ballots that it could have changed the outcome of the election. And this is now under investigation by the state Board of Elections as well as it appears by state and

federal law enforcement officials. This is not the kind of election fraud that Republicans across the country have used to justify ballot restrictions in recent years. Explain the difference well, so, the most common kind of election restriction that we've seen put in place in recent years are voter identification laws. These are laws that would require you to show a certain kind of i D A photo i D like a driver's license or passport before you're allowed to vote.

That kind of requirement would prevent impersonation fraud, where one person goes to the polling place and pretends to be someone else. That kind of fraud is not really a kind of fraud that we see on any kind of scale as a way stealing elections. While fraud related to absentee ballots, while a small problem, it has been documented as a problem this Blatant County is certainly not the

first instance where we've seen this. Having a voter ideal in place doesn't stop someone from collecting absentee ballots, filling them out. Destroying absente ballots really has nothing to do

with it. And so while the many of the laws are aimed at stop in one kind of fraud, a kind of fraud that doesn't happen uh, the laws are not really aimed at stopping this other kind of fraud, And so it makes you wonder whether these laws are actually being passed to prevent fraud as is claimed, or maybe they're being passed to suppress the vote of those who are least likely to have a kind of voter identification. In the Shelby County case, the Supreme Court gutted the

landmark Voting Rights Act. Does this situation show that that was done too quickly and that that this situation might have been prevented if it had still been in place.

While I do think that the Court is wrong in gutting the part of the Voting Rights Act that required that jurisdictions with the history of race discrimination and voting get approval or preclearance before they made changes in their voting rules, I don't believe that this kind of wholesale fraud being conducted with absentee ballots would have been affected

by um the Shelby County case. I mean, really, this this is not a situation where something that was would not have been precleared, like say a voter I D law, strict voter ID law that my disenfranchised minority voters would now be able to go into effect. So, while there are many things to say against the Shelby County decision, I don't think this is affected one way or the other by that what would have prevented this sure, So the states have different rules for um making sure that

absentee ballots are handled properly. One of the big controversies is over whether someone can collect the ballots of someone else who's a non relative. This is known somewhat pejoratively as ballot harvesting, and the concern is that you might have people collecting ballots and doing things bad things with them, as as has been alleged in this election. UH. There are safeguards that can be put in place to prevent that.

So one of the things is that when these ballots are collected in North Carolina, they have to be witnessed, so two people have to sign or there has to be a signature under penalty of perjury with affidavit um.

And so one of the things that's going on in this investigation is that they are looking at the patterns of the people who have signed these UH as witnesses signed these ballot um applications at ballot applications, and when you're seeing one person signing thirty fifty of these applications, you can kind of see if there's a pattern there, see, you know, what, what was it? And one of the things that we've seen is that you see some of these people who collected dozens of ballot those people have

now been interviewed. There was a story in BuzzFeed that that some of them were, uh, we're being paid to bring the ballots and not deliver them to election officials, but to bring them back to a consultant's office. The reports that this involved um this being done potentially in exchange for drugs, and so there's all kinds of nefarious

allegations here. The fact that you can look at the signatures and see the patterns is one way of knowing this, and another way of knowing this is looking at the patterns of absentee ballots that have been requested and those

that have been returned. And it looks like a lot of ballots that were requested, many more were requested in this county compared to other counties, and many fewer democratic ballots were returned in this county compared to other counties, which suggests that you can kind of look at the

data and look for patterns. And I think the the overall lesson here is that when you have safeguards in place, it doesn't mean that the elections are always going to be perfect, but it means that there's enough uh evidence there data there that you could look at to try to figure out when there is a problem and then investigate. Which is so I think this show is actually the

system is working, not that it's not working. Just for a moment, let's go to Georgia and tell us a little bit about the federal lawsuit there between Democrats Stacy Abrams and Secretary State Brian Kemp and what the issue is there with about a minute, sure, so Kemp's now

out of office. This is a suit against his successor, and it's claiming that a whole host of problems and how the elections have been run, from voter purges to how the voting machinery works to the handling of things at the Poland place, and all of the things together

violent the Voting Rights Act and are unconstitutional. They're trying to make a claim that you should look at this holistically and when you look at it as a whole, it is disenfranchising voters, uh, and that there needs to be a kind of global remedy to fix Georgia's election system. Thank you so much, rick Always a pleasure. That's Ricksen a professor at the University of California Irvine School of Law and founder of the Election Law BLAG. Thanks for

listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and on bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brosso. This is Bloomberg