North Carolina's Board of Elections has refused to certify the results of the U.S. House race in the 9th Congressional District, citing irregularities with mail-in absentee ballots. Those irregularities appears to center around a man named Leslie McCrae Dowless, a campaign consultant and the elected vice chairman of the Bladen County Soil and Water Conservation District.

Republican Mark Harris, who appeared to have defeated Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes, hired Dowless as "an independent contractor who worked on grassroots for the campaign, independent of the campaign," Harris strategist Andy Yates told The Charlotte Observer. Dowless, who goes by McCrae, was paid by Red Dome Group, a firm founded by Yates that was dissolved in mid-2017, according to the North Carolina Secretary of State's Office. Dowless was convicted of felony perjury and felony insurance fraud in the 1990s and served more than six months of a two-year sentence.

Dowless appears to have organized "a targeted effort to illegally pick up ballots, in which even the person picking them up had no idea whether those ballots were even delivered to the elections board," WSOC-TV reports. He declined to answer questions from WSOC's Joe Bruno, but Bruno did get on-camera confirmation from a woman named Ginger Eason that Dowless paid her to pick up absentee ballots and deliver them to him. She said Dowless did not inform her that collecting absentee ballots violated North Carolina law.