In October, I previewed the congressional race in North Carolina's Ninth District, a set of mostly-rural counties southeast of Charlotte. In May, incumbent Robert Pittenger lost the GOP primary to anti-gay Islamaphobe Mark Harris; on Election Day, Harris beat Democrat Dan McCready, a 35-year-old Marine Corps veteran, by a scant 905 votes. It turns out that this might be because the district is the site of a massive, brazen, and almost-successful attempt by Republicans to steal a seat in Congress.

In the election's immediate aftermath, a few curious patterns emerged: As noted by the Washington Post, in all but one of the district's counties, McCready won among mail-in absentee ballot voters by at least 16 points. In Bladen County, he lost by 24. And of the number of absentee ballots issued in Bladen County, an unusually low percentage were returned. In other words, a ton of people who ostensibly wanted to vote didn't follow through, and a disproportionate chunk of those who did backed Harris. On November 29, the state elections board unanimously declined to certify the results until they could figure out exactly what happened here.

At this point, the story moves from "strange" to "honest-to-God banana republic shit" territory: In a series of sworn affidavits, several people allege that one Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr.—a well-known GOP operative employed by the Harris campaign as a contractor—led a crew that went door-to-door in Bladen County to collect blank or partially-completed absentee ballots, promising to finish and submit the ballots on the voters' behalf. The extent to which Harris knew exactly what Dowless was doing remains unclear. But according to one affidavit, Dowless bragged that Harris paid him for his services only in cash. The voter fraud, as they say, is coming from inside the house.

In North Carolina, two witnesses must sign each absentee ballot as a safeguard against, apparently, this exact type of fraud. An investigation by Charlotte's ABC affiliate, WSOC-TV, found that the same eight people "witnessed" an inordinate number of ballots: Woody Hester signed 44, James Singletary signed 42, and so on. Five of these eight witnesses listed the same one-bedroom apartment as their address. In some cases, two of the eight names appear on the same ballot. And one Lisa Britt, whose autograph appears on 42 ballots, happens to be Dowless' stepdaughter.

These patterns, of course, would make no sense if ballots were being mailed in by individuals, at different times and from different places all over the county. They would make a ton of sense, though, if ballots were, say, harvested by a small group of people with links to Dowless, and then submitted from one central location for counting.

On Monday, WSOC reporter Joe Bruno tracked down Ginger Easton, who signed 28 ballots. On camera, and in to a microphone, she nonchalantly explained that Dowless paid her between $75 and $100 a week to convince voters to surrender their unfinished ballots.

She added that she doesn't know what happened to the ballots after that. "Whatever they do, that's on them," she said—a line that will not go over well when this clip is inevitably played for a jury of her peers.