McCrae Dowless

RALEIGH, N.C. — Affidavits released Sunday by North Carolina’s elections board allege absentee ballots were collected from voters by the man at the center of vote fraud allegations or those working for him.

These latest documents focus on last month’s disputed 9th Congressional District race, the year’s only unresolved congressional election. Investigators are looking into whether McCrae Dowless and others working on behalf of GOP candidate Mark Harris ran an illegal operation to collect large numbers of absentee ballots from voters in at least two counties.

In the batch of affidavits released Sunday, voter Christopher Eason of Bladenboro alleges he gave his signed but otherwise blank mail-in absentee ballot directly to Dowless, who had been hired by the chief strategist for Harris’ campaign. It’s illegal for anyone other than a close relative or guardian to take a person’s ballot.

“I signed the absentee ballot envelope but left the ballot completely blank. I did not make any selections in any of the contests on the ballot,” Eason said in his affidavit signed Dec. 7, adding Dowless came to his home and asked for his absentee ballot.

Another voter, Hazel Guyton of Bladenboro, said in an affidavit that she filled out her absentee ballot and Dowless and a woman stopped by to pick it up. She said he’d been “doing that for me for several years,” though she states she suffers no legal disabilities.

Dowless is a “person of interest” in an investigation into irregularities in the 9th District race. His attorney has asserted previously that Dowless hasn’t broken any campaign laws.

Also released Sunday was an analysis by a Harvard professor who found rates of unreturned absentee ballots in two 9th District counties were “extreme statistical outliers.”

The professor said absentee mail voting patterns in two counties differed considerably from other counties in two ways: The “exceedingly high rates” of unreturned ballots and the performance of the Republican candidate in those areas.