美国国家公共电台 NPR As Election Fraud Probe Centers On N.C.'s 9th District, A Cynical Cloud Settles In

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

We travel next to the center of an alleged 1 case of election fraud. It is Bladen County, N.C., part of North Carolina's 9th Congressional District. It's rural, about 150 miles east of Charlotte. It is home to a facility that is part of the country's largest pork processing plant, Smithfield Foods. NPR's Miles Parks went to Bladen.

MILES PARKS, BYLINE 2: Inside his barbershop in Bladenboro, N.C., Rodney Baxley is giving Bobby Simmons a haircut. They're talking about what everyone in this part of the state has been talking about for the better part of the past month, McCrae Dowless and the operation he was running to get out the vote for Republican Mark Harris.

RODNEY BAXLEY: You know, I don't think he cares who wins as long as he makes money is the way I look at it.

BOBBY SIMMONS: He's in it for the cash.

BAXLEY: He's in it for the money to make a living because I don't - I'm not sure if he works anymore.

PARKS: A number of voters have come forward to say Dowless collected their ballots 4, which is illegal. In North Carolina, only a voter or their near relative can return an absentee ballot 3. One man signed an affidavit 5 this week saying he saw Dowless with as many as 800 ballots in his possession before the election.

All that has the State Board of Elections looking into whether the ballots Dowless handled were actually all turned in or whether they were manipulated in some way. Ultimately, the state board will decide whether a new election is necessary.

Here's Baxley again.

BAXLEY: You know, absentee ballots are supposed to be for people who are off working or overseas or in the military, but, you know, that's not the way it's done around here. They get people to do these absentee ballots so they can control some of them.

PARKS: NPR's reached out to Dowless, but he's declined multiple requests for comment. His friend of 30 years, Pat Melvin, says the spotlight 6 on Dowless and on the Harris campaign is going to ruin politics in the 9th District.

PAT MELVIN: We'll never have any decent people to run for offices again. So that's really what's going to happen. You're just going to get the worst of the worst.

PARKS: Melvin says Dowless didn't do anything illegal. Bladen is a poor county, and Melvin says Dowless was just going into low-income and senior citizen housing units to combat Democratic efforts to court those voters.

MELVIN: And those people probably wouldn't give a [expletive] who they vote for, irregardless (ph). They have nothing to do with politics, but their vote can count. And that's what we're all about - everybody's voting counting. So when one side was doing it, it was perfectly 7 fine. Nobody's ever complained about anything. But then whenever other people were starting to combat, well, listen; this is what it's going to have to take for us to win a race. That's basically what happened.

PARKS: Sandra Hines lives in the Hill Estates, one of the senior communities that Dowless and his team were seen collecting ballots in. She's lived in Bladen on-and-off all her life.

SANDRA HINES: But every time I come back, I get disillusioned 8 and I leave. And I come back, and I leave. And I come back. And you go away and come back 10, 20 years, and it still looks the same. Nothing - no progress. Nothing.

PARKS: She says two women came to her door before the election and signed her up for an absentee ballot. She received it and mailed it in, however. She didn't hand it over to a third party. Still, the ongoing 9 investigation 10 has her suspicious.

HINES: That makes me wonder about any of the other elections. What else has been crookedly 11 done?

PARKS: It kind of affects your faith in the whole system.

HINES: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's been shattered quite a bit with all this.

PARKS: She says she's planning to leave Bladen again this summer to move to California to be with her son and her grandkids. Miles Parks, NPR News, Bladen County, N.C.

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