— Locals worried that elections may have been stolen in Bladen County went to church Tuesday night – literally and figuratively.

Frustrated by decades of racial unfairness and seeing its all-too-familiar signs in the current controversy over 9th Congressional District results, more than 200 people packed the First Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Bladenboro.

They got preached to, and they responded. They shouted in agreement as organizers railed about stolen votes. They laughed as the state NAACP president bashed Raleigh Republicans as bigots, and they nodded with sadness as he recounted the 2014 death of a local black student, whose case was never concluded satisfactorily for some.

But when someone asked for a show of hands from people who believed their votes had been mishandled, there were only a few from the standing-room only crowd. One was from a white Republican worried about a 2010 congressional primary that he lost by more than 5,500 votes.

After more than two hours, there was sparse evidence offered of a stolen election beyond the disconcerting numbers that have helped build a narrative in this part of the state for nearly three weeks: Of the absentee mail-in ballots requested in this year's 9th District race, 3,400 were never returned, and an unusually high number came from Bladen and Robeson counties, where shenanigans are ingrained in local electoral history.

Many of the missing ballots tie to high-minority precincts. Allison Riggs, an attorney heavily involved in North Carolina voting rights cases in recent years with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, told the crowd that black absentee voter turnout in Bladen County's portion of the 9th District totaled 332 people this general election.

In 2014, it was 608 voters.

"There's a racial element to this that's also deeply concerning," Riggs said. "It's anecdotal, but it's consistent and persistent."

Riggs told attendees to talk to their friends and neighbors, and anyone worried about speaking in public could reach out to her confidentially. The NAACP, looking to restart its local chapter here, collected names and phone numbers.

During the meeting, Linda Baldwin recounted her experience from the 2016 election cycle: A young man came to her home and said he was a college student making money by getting people to fill out ballots, so she gave hers to him unsealed, she said.

Cetire Retamar told the crowd that an absentee ballot showed up to her house this cycle, even though she didn't request it. One showed up for her granddaughter, too, she said.

Retamar said she threw her granddaughter's away and took hers with her to vote in person, giving it to a poll worker who likely marked it spoiled to avoid a double count. State records show Retamar, a registered Democrat, cast her vote in person.

It's unclear why ballots showed up at Retamar's house, but Riggs said some times ballots show up unexplained, then someone comes to ask for it. This is an avenue for fraud, and a number of voters have said in the wake of the November election that they received unexplained ballots, or that they showed up to vote only to find election officials had a record of them already turning in an absentee ballot.

Republican Mark Harris won some 61 percent of Bladen County's mail-in absentee ballot vote in November, though just 19 percent of the mail-in ballots accepted were cast by registered Republicans.

These sorts of things are part of the reason the State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement and the Wake County District Attorney's Office are both investigating absentee ballot results in the race. Harris seemed to beat Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes, but the Harris campaign's ties to a supposed shady operator in Bladen County named McCrae Dowless, who has been accused of sending people door to door to collect strangers' ballots, may lead to a new election.

Dowless proclaimed his innocence Tuesday, releasing a short statement through an attorney that amounts to his first significant public comment on the controversy since it began three weeks ago.

Baldwin's story was the one that put Dowless on the state board's radar in 2016. He filed a complaint with the board that year over the unusual number of write-in votes in a local soil and water conservation supervisor's race that he won. That complaint targeted the Bladen County Improvement Association, a group that helps Democrats and black politicians in the county.

The association denied wrongdoing then and continues to do so. Some Republicans have pointed fingers at the group's own absentee and get-out-the-vote operations as Dowless' similar methods have come under scrutiny.

During the hearing over Dowless' complaint, state board member Josh Malcolm questioned Dowless over Baldwin's story. Dowless acknowledged that the boyfriend of one of his get-out-the-vote workers told him he'd taken someone's ballot, but he said repeatedly that he told him to return it.

It's generally illegal to take possession of a stranger's ballot in North Carolina.

The state board turned the matter over to state and federal prosecutors, but it's unclear how much investigation followed.

"The Lord turned that thing way around," Bladen County Commissioner Michael Cogdell, who's also a leader in the Bladen County Improvement Association, said Tuesday.

Cogdell also told the story of Emma Shipman, an 87-year-old woman who has been interviewed many times in recent weeks and who filed an affidavit with the state board swearing that someone came to her home and collected her ballot during the recent elections.

Shipman voted in person, mooting that ballot, but her story has been seen as evidence of what appears to be a much broader effort to collect people's ballots.

Will Breazeale, a Republican in a church full of Democrats on Tuesday, said he now wonders if there was something fishy in the Bladen County results from his 2010 congressional run.

Breazeale said the 9th District needs not just a new general election but a new primary, something the General Assembly opened the door for in legislation it passed last week. That bill is hung up by a broader fight over its language with Gov. Roy Cooper, who has threatened to veto it over a separate provision.

The bill has broad bipartisan support, but some Democrats have said Harris should remain the GOP nominee in a new race against McCready and that holding a new primary would be unconstitutional because the primary race was already certified.

Harris won 96 percent of the mail-in absentee vote in Bladen County in the primary, and he beat Congressman Robert Pittenger by 828 votes district-wide.

The crowd Tuesday included a number of politicians, from in the county and out. Bladen County's first black sheriff, Prentis Benston, attended and said after the meeting that he expects to file a lawsuit over issues from his race in 2014.

Benston lost a close race that year to current Sheriff Jim McVicker. Dowless worked for McVicker in 2017 and 2018, and potentially before as well. It was Benston who won the county's absentee-by-mail count in the 2014 race.

Many in the audience were upset over the results in this year's sheriff's race, which saw McVicker, a white Republican, beat a young black Democrat named Hakeem Brown by nearly 1,400 votes.

"I'm a little bitter tonight," Brown told the crowd before urging them to turn out the vote if there's a new election in the 9th District race.

That was the evening's clarion call: Stay engaged.

"It's been going on for a long time," the Rev. Gregory D. Taylor, who pastors First Baptist Church, told the crowd. "But they just got caught. The Bible says surely your sins will find you out."

Taylor also said he was talking with a colleague from Florida recently who told him people there were buying votes with fish sandwiches.

"Be honest," he told the crowd. "Some of y'all gave up your vote for a chicken sandwich."