Story by Matthew Langston
Stand Up Republic, a 501(c)(4) organization, recently released an attack ad calling on voters to “reject corruption and reject Dan Bishop.”
This is the second attack ad that Stand Up Republic has released against Bishop, a state senator and the Republican candidate in the special election for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District.
UNC FactCheck wrote about the group’s first ad here.
Stand Up Republic was founded in early 2017 by Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn. The pair ran together in the 2016 presidential election as a conservative alternative to then-candidate Donald Trump and have been critics of Trump and the Republican Party since then.
Like its previous ad, this ad from Stand Up Republic makes several claims against Bishop, so it is worth looking at the accuracy of them.
The ad opens with, “Last year, the candidate Dan Bishop supported hired a known criminal to steal our votes and rig the election.” Articles from Politico and PBS News Hour article are cited in the ad.
This claim refers to Mark Harris, the Republican candidate for the 9th District in 2018.
Bishop donated $1,000 to Harris’ campaign on Nov. 14, 2017, and Harris thanked Bishop for his endorsement in a tweet on April 24, 2018. Bishop also encouraged voters to support Harris in a tweet on Oct. 18, 2018.
On March 19, 2019, Bishop threatened to sue former Rep. Robert Pittenger, whom Harris defeated in the Republican primary, for defamation. That came after Pittenger sent an email to supporters in which he claimed Bishop was a “primary advisor” for the Harris campaign and “clearly had knowledge of McCrae Dowless’ fraudulent activities. Pittenger acknowledged that same day that those claims about Bishop were false.
Harris was initially believed to have won the 2018 election by a 905-vote margin over Dan McCready, the Democratic candidate. McCready is running again as the Democratic candidate for the special election.
Some questions began to arise over mail-in absentee ballot results in Bladen and Robeson counties. McCready won a majority of these ballots in seven of the 9th District’s eight counties, with Bladen County being the sole exception. Harris won 61 percent of Bladen’s mail-in ballots, despite only 19 percent of those ballots coming from registered Republicans.
Both counties also saw an abnormally high percentage of mail-in absentee ballots that were not returned. Forty percent were not returned in Bladen County, while 62 percent were not returned in Robeson County.
In a surprise vote, the North Carolina State Board of Elections decided unanimously on Nov. 27, 2018, to delay certification for the results of the 9th District’s regular election. The NCSBE then voted 7-2 a few days later to hold a public evidentiary hearing on “claims of irregularities and fraudulent activities related to absentee by-mail voting” in the 9th District.
In preparation of that hearing, the NCSBE launched an investigation that centered on actions by Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr., a Bladen County political operative who worked for the Harris campaign in 2018.
Dowless is the “known criminal” to whom the Stand Up Republic ad refers. According to an online public database from the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, Dowless was convicted in the late 1980s and early 1990s on multiple charges that included fraud, perjury and worthless checks. The fraud and perjury charges were both felonies.
After some delays, the NCSBE held its public hearing in February, which lasted several days and paved the way for the current special election to be held.
Kim Strach, the board’s executive director, opened the hearing, saying that “a coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” had occurred in Bladen and Robeson counties that was intended to benefit Harris.
Strach said that Dowless paid people to collect absentee ballots from voters, which is illegal in North Carolina. Strach also alleged that Dowless and people working for him forged signatures and filled in incomplete ballots. Strach’s statements were supported by testimony and evidence.
After several days of testimony, which included one of his own sons saying that he had warned his father repeatedly not to hire Dowless, Harris brought the hearing to an end when he admitted that a new election was warranted in the 9thDistrict.
The NCSBE unanimously called for a new election in the 9th District shortly after Harris made that acknowledgement.
After showing mugshots of Dowless, who has faced criminal charges related to his absentee ballot operation since the hearing, the Stand Up Republic ad claims that “corrupt party leaders in Washington and Raleigh knew and let it happen.”
That claim is questionable since there does not appear to be any evidence that party leaders were aware of Dowless’ absentee ballot scheme and its illegal practices.
It is worth noting that the NCSBE had previously investigated Dowless’ absentee ballot tactics after the 2016 election. It urged federal prosecutors in January 2017 to pursue criminal charges against Dowless on the suspicion of absentee ballot fraud. The NCSBE then referred the case to state prosecutors in January 2018 after federal prosecutors took no action on the matter.
The ad also claims that “Dan Bishop changed the rules so that he could run instead,” when a new election was called.
That is a reference to House Bill 1029, a law enacted by the state legislature in December 2018. Its primary purpose was to change existing law to mandate that new primary elections be held if a new congressional election is ordered in North Carolina, which was done with the 9th District in mind.
The bill originally passed with broad bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed H.B. 1029 because he expressed opposition to a provision in the bill that he viewed as “shield[ing] politicians and other violators of campaign finance laws.”
That veto resulted in both chambers voting to override his veto. These votes by the House and the Senate were largely along party lines, with Republicans voting for and Democrats voting against the veto override. This resulted in H.B. 1029 becoming law.
Bishop did support H.B. 1029 in both its initial vote and the veto override vote, but he was not a sponsor of the bill. Bishop was on the conference committee for the bill, and he did defend other provisions of the bill when Cooper criticized them.
It is uncertain if Bishop was considering a potential congressional run when he “changed the rules” by supporting H.B. 1029 since there is no evidence of that. As such, the ad’s claim on that subject could be considered misleading or lacking in context.
The Senate voted to override Cooper’s veto on H.B. 1029 on Dec. 27, 2018, while a new election was not called in the 9th District until Feb. 25, 2019. The dates for the new primary and general election in the 9th District were announced on March 8, 2019, and Bishop filed his paperwork to run on March 14, 2019.
The ad closes by encouraging people to “defend our vote” on Sept. 10, which is Election Day, by “rejecting corruption and rejecting Dan Bishop.”
