RALEIGH, N.C. _ Republican Mark Harris, in a stunning reversal, called Thursday for a new election in North Carolina's 9th Congressional District, giving up hopes of being certified as the winner in a race marked by voting irregularities in Bladen and Robeson counties.
"I believe a new election should be called," Harris said in testimony before the state elections board, citing evidence he had heard over the first three days of the hearing in Raleigh. "It's become clear to me the public's confidence in the 9th District seat general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted."
The five-member board of elections voted unanimously Thursday afternoon to call for a new election. It will set the date for the election.
Harris said he had suffered two strokes while hospitalized for a severe infection.
"Though I thought I was ready to undergo the rigors of this hearing and am getting stronger, clearly I am not and I struggled this morning with both recall and confusion," Harris said. "Neither I nor any of the leadership in my campaign were aware of or condone the improper activities that have been testified to."
Harris then left the witness stand and the hearing room. As he walked away from reporters, his wife Beth put her arm around his back and rubbed it. They disappeared down the hallway in the North Carolina State Bar building.
Previously, Harris had maintained he was unaware of any absentee ballot fraud and insinuated there was a plot to deny him a seat in Congress. The state Republican Party and its officers also had also stood behind him and demanded he be certified the winner.
At a Feb. 9 meeting of the North Carolina GOP executive committee, Harris said, "The Democrats and liberal media have spared no expense disparaging my good name" and blamed "a liberal activist" on the Board of Elections for the whole episode. He called the absentee ballot-harvesting allegations "unsubstantiated slandering," according to a video of that meeting posted online.
Harris took the stand Thursday morning, one day after testimony from his son, John Harris, a federal prosecutor in Raleigh. John Harris testified and emails showed that he warned his father about hiring Bladen County operative McCrae Dowless to run a mail-in absentee ballot program during the 2018 campaign.
A member of North Carolina's State Board of Elections pressed Harris on why he didn't heed warnings from his son.
"It was painfully clear to me that your son was saying, 'Daddy, don't mess with this guy,'" board member Jeff Carmon told Harris on the fourth day of a hearing. "This is beyond a red flag. That was your son with no axe to grind who wanted to make sure you were protected."
John Harris' dramatic testimony Wednesday, which brought his father to tears, included emails from April 2017 in which he warned the candidate that Dowless might have been engaged in illegal vote "harvesting," which other witnesses confirmed this week. John Harris even sent his father a copy of the law that bans vote harvesting.
"I didn't take it as a major warning _ 'Danger Ahead,'" Harris said Thursday. "He raised concerns (about Dowless). I did not consider John's (emails) to be a warning. I thought he was overreacting."
"I'm his dad, and I know he's a little judgmental, and has a little taste of arrogance," Harris said.
The candidate's testimony came on the fourth day of a hearing to decide the unresolved congressional race. Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes in unofficial returns in the district that runs from Charlotte to Bladen County.
Harris entered the hearing calling on the board to certify his apparent victory and send him to Congress. McCready's attorneys wanted the board to call for a new election in the 9th District.
But the Harris campaign was on the defensive from the start Thursday.
Elections officials announced the campaign had just turned over more than 800 pages of documents Wednesday night, long after the deadline. Harris attorney John Branch took responsibility for the late arrival. But Marc Elias, attorney for McCready, expressed surprise about emails and other documents that had "miraculously appeared."
"I feel frankly that a game of three-card Monte is going on," he told the board.
Harris described meeting Dowless through the intercession of a mutual friend, former Judge Marion Warren. Harris knew that Dowless had helped Todd Johnson win almost all absentee votes in the 2016 GOP congressional primary.
In a 2017 email to Warren, one of the documents turned over Wednesday night, Harris said he wanted to meet "the guy whose absentee ballot project for Johnson could have put me in the U.S. House this term had I known and had he been helping us."
Harris said he met with Dowless and other local voters April 6, 2017, in Bladen County. When John Harris expressed concerns a day later, after having done an analysis of 2016 absentee votes, Harris recalled saying, "John, it all comes down to relationships. ... "
He said he weighed his son's concerns against what he'd seen in Bladen and the description of his program he'd heard from Dowless.
"The relationships I felt was what caused him (Dowless) to be successful," he said. "I did have a comfort level at that point."
Harris said he took Dowless' word about the legality of his operation. He said he also asked his manin consultant, Andy Yates, to weigh in.
Yates testified over two days this week that Dowless' hiring was a "done deal" by the time he came on board in the summer of 2017. He also testified that for the most part he paid Dowless not on invoices but by verbal requests. Elections officials say Yates' company, Red Dome Group, paid Dowless a total of $131,000 during the campaign.
In answer to questions, Harris said he didn't know about the lack of oversight until this week.
"I did not know it was simply word of mouth," he told the board. "I was not keeping up with the checks and the money being spent down there until I saw your figures here."
Harris was asked about a check he wrote Dowless in May 2017 made payable to "Patriots for Progress," a political action committee. Kim Westbrook Strach, executive director of the board, asked him if he knew it was illegal for campaigns to coordinate with PACs set up for independent spending. He said he did not.
Carmon, the board member and a Democrat, concluded his questions to Harris with one more: "(Did) you just want to win?"
