The race between the Republican Mark Harris and the Democrat Dan McCready was closely watched ahead of the election, with Democrats hopeful they could flip the seat, currently held by Representative Robert Pittenger, whom Harris defeated in the GOP primary. But McCready conceded the day after the election, and though unofficial totals showed Harris with a slim 905-vote lead, the election seemed to be over.

But that was dramatically overturned when the NCSBE met in November and declined to certify the results of the election. Affidavits and reporting turned up evidence of widespread, significant fraud in Bladen County, a southeastern county that’s part of the Ninth Congressional District. McCrae Dowless, a veteran political operative who was subcontracted to do voter-turnout work for the Harris campaign, requested nearly 600 absentee ballots. According to claims, Dowless had a team of workers who went around collecting ballots, some of them incomplete, from voters—a violation of state law. Hundreds of absentee ballots that were requested were never turned in, raising questions about ballot destruction. On Tuesday, WECT obtained an affidavit of a man who says he saw Dowless with hundreds of completed ballots.

Dowless, a convicted felon, had previously come under scrutiny for past election work. During a 2016 hearing about a fraud complaint he himself had filed, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The former executive director of the NCSBE, Gary Bartlett, told me that the board had previously investigated fraud issues in Bladen County and referred them to prosecutors. Dowless did not return calls for comment.

Harris has denied any wrongdoing or knowledge of Dowless’s methods. His campaign owes Red Dome Consulting, which hired Dowless, more than $40,000 for work in Bladen County.

Although the alleged scale of the fraud is large, the idea that the board of elections would order a do-over seemed initially remote. Though it has ordered local elections to be rerun, there’s never been a mulligan on a U.S. House race in the state.

Yet what began as a remote possibility has become ever more likely over the past two weeks. Harris has been practically silent since the fraud claims came to light, but in a December 7 video, he said that if the amount of fraud could have tipped the election, he’d support a do-over.

On Monday, The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer reported that a witness said Bladen County officials had counted early votes ahead of Election Day—a violation of state rules—and had allowed outsiders to see them. Knowing early-vote totals could give a campaign crucial intelligence to inform Election Day tactics.

That was apparently enough to sway state Republican officials. In the early days of the news, Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the North Carolina GOP, insisted that Harris’s victory be certified and that any investigation could follow. But on Tuesday, Woodhouse said that if it was true that early-vote totals had leaked, there must be another election.