In the Ninth Congressional District, the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, hired Leslie McCrae Dowless, an election operative with a “shady” reputation, to ensure that there would be enough votes to send Mr. Harris to Capitol Hill. Even though Mr. Harris’s son, an assistant United States attorney, repeatedly warned him against this hire.

When the ballots were tallied, Mr. Harris was ahead by 905 votes. His total included 61 percent of the absentee ballots in Bladen County, though only 19 percent there were cast by Republicans.

Something was also awry in Robeson County, where 40 percent of African-Americans’ absentee ballots and 60 percent of Native Americans’ absentee ballots were never officially turned in. Mr. Dowless, elections officials concluded, had illegally gathered, altered and discarded more than 1,000 absentee ballots in Bladen and Robeson Counties. The election’s results were so bizarre that the state elections board refused to certify the vote.

Mr. Dowless and four other people are now under indictment.

Faced with this brazen attempt to steal a congressional seat, most of the national Republican leadership simply went silent.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who has repeatedly articulated his contempt for voting rights, laid the blame for the election fraud debacle on Democrats and their refusal to back voter ID laws. This was catnip for the Republican base, which has been convinced that voter fraud happens regularly. And Mr. McConnell managed to swap the reality of election fraud for the fiction of voter fraud to mask that it was the Republican who hired the disreputable campaign operative.