Election 2018

In three days I’ve gone from thinking that Mark Harris should have known better to thinking there’s reason to believe he may have been actively directing the vote-buying scheme. https://t.co/gNFwtWxcMf

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) February 21, 2019

And too many of the Media Village Idiots are treating the whole shameless theft as some kind of quaint Suthron folk saga — practically Absalom, Absalom!, but with fewer run-on sentences. The Washington Post, which should know better:

… It was a heart-wrenching drama between an evangelical minister, who badly wanted to serve in Congress, and his lawyer son, who came forward with evidence that contradicted his father’s testimony.

Republicans and Democrats agreed that something went right compared with how partisan conflict often plays out in the country’s hyper-polarized political environment…

The hearing had taken a dramatic turn the previous day, when Harris’s 29-year-old son John, an assistant U.S. attorney in Raleigh, took the stand and described conversations and emails with his father in 2017 in which he warned the elder Harris against hiring Dowless. John Harris believed Dowless had broken the law in a previous election.

Harris parried confidently about his son’s testimony, explaining that he hadn’t taken the advice seriously. “My son was still my son — 27 years old,” he said.

What Harris did not say is that he had told another son, Matthew, on the eve of John’s testimony that he did not think his emails with John would come up in the hearing. He did not know that John Harris had already turned over the emails. More important, it was a sign that his campaign may not have fully complied with the state board’s subpoena for documents and communications related to Dowless…

Harris faced potential legal jeopardy and a brutal cross-examination from Elias, a prominent and aggressive Democratic lawyer from Washington. The board’s lawyers asked Elias whether he would let Harris go if Harris also agreed to say that a new election was warranted.

Freedman mentioned Harris’s health problems — he was still recovering from a serious infection that had led to sepsis and two strokes. Freedman added that Harris’s medications had affected his memory on the stand…

Republican politicians have for years railed against the threat of voter fraud in the U.S.

But when a North Carolina election was overturned this week because of election fraud by a Republican political operative, the GOP was largely muted in its responsehttps://t.co/jMqft7w9uS

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 23, 2019

The US Attorney in NC’s Eastern District was tipped off about the absentee ballot fraud scheme in #NC09 in 2017. He’s focused instead on rooting out extremely rare, usually mistaken instances of non-citizen voting. My story on Bobby Higdon: https://t.co/RVKFU4l1i8

— Allegra Kirkland (@allegrakirkland) February 22, 2019