As the leader of North Carolina’s Baptist Convention, Mark Harris spearheaded a statewide effort to ban gay marriage, which he used as a springboard to run for the U.S. Senate, in 2014. (“I was willing to do whatever it took to be the man that God would use,” he said in a speech the following year to other religious leaders, “and sacrifice whatever needed to be sacrificed.”) But his Senate bid came up short, and, in 2016, he lost a Republican primary for North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District. In last year’s midterm elections, Harris defeated the centrist incumbent in the Republican primary by eight hundred and twenty-eight votes, and faced off against the Democrat Dan McCready, a former marine and solar-power entrepreneur, in what became one of the hardest-fought races in the nation. Although gerrymandering had kept the Ninth District in Republican hands for nearly two generations, analysts speculated that not even the multiple rallies that President Donald Trump held for Harris’s campaign could stop the “blue wave.” But on Election Night, Harris was declared the victor by nine hundred and five votes, despite losing six of eight counties in the district. “Thank God for Bladen County,” Harris declared.

On Monday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections convened a special hearing to consider whether Harris had stolen the congressional seat. In early December, the bipartisan agency had refused to certify the election results because of irregularities discovered with hundreds of mail-in ballots, most of which had originated in Bladen County. In the course of last week’s hearings, in Raleigh, investigators laid out their case—based on at least a hundred and seventy-two interviews and tens of thousands of pages of records—that the election had been tainted by a “coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme.” At the center of the scandal was the Republican operative Harris had employed in Bladen County, Leslie McCrae Dowless, whose operation, according to investigators, included filling out at least a thousand mail-in-ballot requests, many without voters’ knowledge, and deploying a team of friends, family members, and other associates to pose as election officials and collect them. Votes for Democrats were allegedly tossed out, and everything else was cast—or altered—for Harris. Among the important questions to be answered at the hearings was what Harris knew about Dowless’s scheme, and when he knew about it.

North Carolina’s Republican establishment had vehemently maintained that Harris should be allowed to claim the vacant congressional seat. At a meeting of the state’s G.O.P. executive committee, on February 9th, Harris had blamed the controversy on “a liberal activist” on the Board of Elections and dismissed the allegations of absentee-ballot fraud as “unsubstantiated slandering” driven by the “liberal media.” A month earlier, in an interview with a local TV station, Harris insisted that he had only become aware of concerns about Dowless when the North Carolina Board of Elections declined to certify the race. Since then, he said, his team had fully coöperated with the investigation. “We’ve tried to do it right,” he said. “We’ve tried to follow the process.”

On the first day of the hearings, Lisa Britt, the daughter of Dowless’s ex-wife, said she collected more than thirty ballots, which she gave to Dowless. She also said that she altered between five and ten ballots herself. Britt described extensive efforts to hide the fraud: ballots were sent at staggered times, mailed from the post office nearest a voter’s home, and the ink color of fraudulent witness signatures was carefully matched with those of voters. Britt also produced a typed message from Dowless, given to her a few days before her testimony, which instructed her to say he was free of guilt and to plead the Fifth. She trusted Dowless, she said, because he “has been a father figure to me for thirty years,” and she didn’t expect him “to put you out here to do something illegal.” Later that day, Dowless himself took the Fifth.

Over the next two days, Andy Yates, who effectively ran Harris’s campaign through his political consultancy, Red Dome, spent eight hours on the stand. Later, Harris testified that he had expected Yates to provide oversight of Dowless. Yates said that his background check on Dowless consisted of a Google search and a cursory look at CourtRecords.org, which revealed three misdemeanor charges, including “assault on a female.” (Dowless also has a felony fraud conviction.) According to Yates, this was not a concern because Harris, who had already settled on the hire, had alerted him that Dowless had charges “related to a divorce.” Yates said that Dowless also assured him that his absentee-ballot program was legal. During the campaign, Yates paid Dowless more than a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, including a monthly fee that rose to more than sixteen hundred dollars, and around two dollars and fifty cents for each mail-in ballot collected by one of Dowless’s workers. Yates never asked to see any receipts. “If his word was good enough for Dr. Harris,” Yates said, “it was good enough for me.”

At the close of Yates’s testimony, Kim Strach, the director of the North Carolina Board of Elections, asked if Yates had any recollection of someone warning him about Dowless. When he said that he did not, she pressed him. “I just want to ask you,” she said, “do you recall having a phone conversation with Dr. Harris’s son, John Harris?” Yates, who appeared surprised, denied being warned by John Harris about Dowless. “If that conversation happened,” he said, “I do not recall it happening.” Strach could barely suppress a smile. “O.K.,” she said. “That’s all I have.”

Ever since the scandal broke, in late November, 2018, Harris’s son, John, a twenty-nine-year-old federal prosecutor in Raleigh, had restricted contact with his father, speaking to him only at holiday gatherings and after Harris was hospitalized for a severe infection, in early 2019. Around 11 o’clock on the evening after Yates’s testimony, John’s younger brother Matthew told his father that John would be testifying the next day—“I don’t want you to be shocked,” Harris later recalled Matthew saying. In fact, during the first two days of testimony, John had been sequestered in a room separate from most of the other witnesses. Moments before he was sworn in, on the third day, the lawyers for Harris’s campaign frantically attempted to submit additional evidence: e-mail correspondence between John and his father spanning the previous two years. Josh Lawson, the general counsel for the Board of Elections, initially refused the offer; it quickly became clear that the state already had access to them.

“I thought what [Dowless] was doing was illegal, and I was right,” John said during his testimony. Dowless, he added, had told his parents and other campaign associates that “he wasn’t doing any of this, and they believed him.” Seated near the front of the room, about twenty-five feet away from his son, Harris placed three fingers over his mouth and silently wept.

According to the e-mails and John’s subsequent testimony, Harris first became aware of Dowless in June of 2016, during his first run for the Ninth District seat. On the night of the primary election, John returned home from the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., where he then worked as a law clerk, to watch the returns on the Board of Elections’ Web site. John testified that when Robert Pittenger won by a hundred and thirty-four votes, the margin was so slim that he began poring over voting data, looking for anything that might spur a recount for his father. Soon he discovered an anomaly in the mail-in ballots in Bladen County: Todd Johnson had won two hundred and fourteen, Harris had scored four, and Pittenger had got zero. At 11:04 P.M., he sent an e-mail to his father noting that “this smacks of something gone awry.”