North Carolina Elections Board Dissolves, Adding New Chaos in House Race

The unwinding of the State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement was a consequence of a long-running battle over partisan power in North Carolina and separate from the election fraud investigation. Yet the dissolution heightened the possibility that the 9th District seat would remain empty for weeks or even months, and it plunged the chaotic fight for the House seat into deeper turmoil.

“We have entered no man’s land,” said J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina. “It is symptomatic of the bigger partisan polarization that we are living in and experiencing hour by hour in this state.”

The board’s dissolution Friday only complicated the clash over the 9th District, where Mark Harris, the Republican nominee for Congress, appeared to defeat Dan McCready, the Democratic candidate, by 905 votes in last month’s general election. But state officials have been investigating whether a contractor for Harris engaged in illegal activity to compromise the election on the Republican’s behalf. According to witnesses and affidavits, the contractor, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., and people working for him collected absentee ballots in violation of state law.

The allegations of misconduct prompted the elections board to refuse to certify Harris as the winner and to order an inquiry. That investigation has involved more than 100 interviews and at least 182,000 pages of records, and state officials said Friday that it would continue at the staff level, even if a board was not in place to consider evidence and chart a way forward.

“The staff will continue to investigate the 9th District irregularities and perform all other elections-related functions,” said Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the state board.

No one has been charged in connection with the allegations, including Dowless, who has a history of convictions for fraud and perjury and was previously scrutinized by authorities for possible election tampering. Dowless, who has declined to comment, refused a request to meet with state investigators.

Around the time of the board’s dissolution Friday, Joshua D. Malcolm, the Democrat who was chairman of the panel, complained that Harris’ campaign had not been forthcoming with information that investigators demanded with a subpoena.

Malcolm, in a letter to a lawyer for the campaign, said investigators had received 398 pages of campaign records — and believed there were about 140,000 other documents that “may be responsive but have not yet been produced.”

“You are hereby requested to fully comply with the board’s subpoena so as to not further impact the agency’s ability to resolve the investigation,” Malcolm wrote. He also said that the board had “issued numerous additional subpoenas” in the hours before its dissolution.

Investigators had been expected to present their findings at an elections board hearing Jan. 11. After reviewing evidence at that hearing, the state board was expected to determine whether to order a new election under a North Carolina law that allows a new vote if “irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness.”

But plans for the January hearing, and the fate of the nine-member board, eventually ran headlong into a case that dealt with the constitutionality of the elections board’s design. On Thursday night, in a decision that stunned North Carolina Democrats and Republicans alike, a three-judge panel angrily rejected a bipartisan request to extend the life of the board temporarily.

The ruling left the board with less than 24 hours to exist and plans for the Jan. 11 hearing uncertain. State officials said Friday that the structure of legislation setting up the future elections board meant it could not begin operations until Jan. 31.

But Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said Friday he intended to name an interim board until the new law took effect. It was not immediately clear how quickly Cooper would act, but Republicans said that they would challenge such a move.

“There is no authority for any interim board of any sort to take any action at all,” state Rep. David R. Lewis, a Republican with substantial influence on elections policy in North Carolina, wrote on Twitter.

Before the board’s end Friday, Harris, who previously acknowledged that he directed Dowless’ hiring but said he knew of no wrongdoing, made a final effort to have the panel certify his election. In an emergency motion to the state board, Harris’ campaign asserted that it was “not aware of irregularities or other concerns sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election.”

The board, which said it received the motion at 10:15 a.m., took no action before its dissolution at noon. A lawyer for Harris’ campaign did not immediately respond to a message.

Even if the board had declared Harris the victor, there was no guarantee that the House would have seated him Thursday, when the new Congress was scheduled to convene. Congressional Democrats, who will control the House starting next week, had signaled they would not permit Harris’ inauguration while the allegations of fraud were unsettled.

The House has the constitutional authority to be “the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democrats’ nominee for speaker, has said she would not immediately seat Harris unless the race was certified by the state.

If it is not — and in the absence of a North Carolina board of elections — the election could become the subject of an investigation by the House Administration Committee after Democrats take power next week. The committee has the authority to investigate the election, to determine a winner, or to call for a new election if it deems it necessary — a process that could take at least weeks.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.