The hinkiness of the electoral system here in the World's Greatest Democracy never sleeps. There's some authentic weirdness going on right now regarding the election just passed in the Ninth Congressional District of the newly insane state of North Carolina. As it stands at the moment, Republican Mark Harris has beaten Democratic candidate Dan McCready by 907 votes.

However, as it stands now, the result stinks—so much so that the state's Board of Elections has taken the remarkable step of unanimously refusing to certify the current results. From the Charlotte Observer:

Election board member Joshua Malcolm raised the issue in what was expected to be a routine certification of the results of North Carolina’s 13 congressional races. He asked the board to remove the 9th District from the list of those to be certified.

“I’m very familiar with unfortunate activities that have been happening down in my part of the state,” vice chair Malcolm, a Robeson County Democrat, told the board. “And I am not going to turn a blind eye to what took place to the best of my understanding which has been ongoing for a number of years that has repeatedly been referred to the United States attorney and the district attorneys for them to take action and clean it up. And in my opinion those things have not taken place.”

Dan McCready Jeff Siner AP

Malcolm cited a statute that allows the board the authority to take any necessary action “to assure that an election is determined without taint of fraud or corruption and without irregularities that may have changed the result of an election.”

At issue are the results in a place called Bladen County, a chunk of the southeastern part of the state along Rte. 87 between Fayetteville and the seaside city of Wilmington. At the moment, Harris has won the county by 1,557 votes. At the moment.

Again, from the Observer:

Wallace went on to say a review of public records “confirms that serious irregularities and improprieties may have occurred.” Bladen County had the highest percentage of absentee ballot requests in the state. There, 7.5 percent of registered voters requested absentee ballots. In most counties it was less than 3 percent.

An analysis by Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer suggested more aberrations. In seven of the eight counties in the 9th District, for example, McCready won a lopsided majority of the mailed-in absentee ballots. But not in Bladen County. There, Republican Mark Harris won 61 percent even though registered Republicans accounted for only 19 percent of the county’s accepted absentee ballots.

Unaffiliated voters accounted for 39 percent. Bitzer said Harris’ margin “could potentially come from all those unaffiliated voters.” “But to have each and every one of those unaffiliated voters vote Republican, that’s pretty astonishing,” he added. “If that’s the case, there’s a very concerted effort to use that method to one candidate’s advantage. . . . But at that level there’s something else beyond a concerted effort that could be at work.”

Such as?

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In his letter to the board, Wallace included notarized affidavits from a handful of voters:

▪ Datesha Montgomery said that on Oct. 12, a woman came by her house and told her she was collecting absentee ballots. In the affidavit, Montgomery said she voted for two candidates: one for sheriff, the other for school board. The woman told her “the others were not important. I gave her the ballot and she said she would finish it herself. I signed the ballot and she left. It was not sealed up at any time.”

▪ Emma Shipman said a woman came to her house and told her she was assigned to collect absentee ballots. “I filled out the ballot while she waited outside and gave it to her. . . . She took the ballot and put it in an envelope and never sealed it or asked me to sign it. Then she left. . . . I thought she was legitimate.”

▪ Lucy Young said she received an absentee ballot even though she didn’t request one. She’d already voted early in person.

Suspicions have fallen on one McCrae Dowless, a local soil and water district supervisor who has been involved in alleged ratfcking before.

LOGAN CYRUS Getty Images

In fact, according to the Observer, Dowless may have been involved in helping to ratfck incumbent Republican congressman Mark Pittinger out of the primary in favor of Harris.

In 2016, then-Gov. Pat McCrory complained about what he called a “massive voting fraud scheme” in Bladen County. At the time, there was a protest filed by Dowless, a soil and water district supervisor. He claimed irregularities in mail-in absentee ballots.

This year he worked as a contractor for Huntersville-based Red Dome group, according to founder Andy Yates. He was an independent contractor who worked on grassroots for the campaign, independent of the campaign . . . as he’s done for a number of campaigns over the years,” said Yates, Harris’ top strategist.

In this year’s primary, Harris won 437 absentee votes in Bladen to 17 for GOP incumbent Rep. Robert Pittenger. This month Harris won 420 absentee votes to McCready’s 258. In the 2016 congressional primary, Dowless worked for Todd Johnson. Johnson got 221 absentee votes to 4 for Harris and 1 for Pittenger. In the district as a whole, Johnson finished third.

McCready didn't help his own cause by conceding to Harris, and then by not asking for a district-wide recount that was his legal right, given the closeness of the election. (He has subsequently announced his support for the Board of Elections' investigation.) But this whole mess is nothing if not yet another example of why, for federal elected offices at least, some form of national system of conducting elections, and of safeguarding the ballots, has to be developed. Jeh Johnson has been right about this for years. Our voting system is part of the vital national infrastructure.

After all, you wouldn't hand air-traffic control over to a soil and water supervisor. Forget I said that. Wouldn't want to give them ideas.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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