NC-09: WHO hid the Robeson County ballot harvesting evidence?
Jay DeLancy and Raleigh’s Voter Integrity Project really want to know:
Earlier last week, I was able to ask State BOE Director of Investigations, Joan Fleming, about the disparity between the Absentee Ballot Request logs used by two counties in their investigation into alleged criminal behavior by McCrae Dowless in Bladen County.
Last week’s post only offered an attachment of the Bladen documents, but not images of the forms themselves. This was the most damaging evidence for another Bladen County absentee ballot machine operator named Lola Wooten. We noticed with frustration that anytime her name was mentioned at the Mark Harris Show Trial, Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie attorney representing Dan McCready, would talk over the conversation to make sure nobody understood any allegations against Ms. Wooten.[…]
The evidence clearly suggested that Wooten had a well-organized ballot seeding and harvesting effort underway in Bladen County. We’ve been assured the 2018 case is still being investigated.
We know from Investigations Director Fleming and from various news accounts that the SBOE conducted numerous interviews of voters whose absentee ballot was requested by Dowless.
Question for the SBOE: How many of the Wooten recipients did your agency interview?
Meanwhile in Robeson . . .
Rather than submitting four pages of requests (as Bladen did), Robeson submitted Exhibit 66, showing only Jennifer Boyd, a Dowless employee. Robeson supplied no other names and this “puzzled” SBOE Director Kim Strach.
When asked directly about why the SBOE investigators accepted this evidence that clearly omitted the names of everybody else seeding the more than 2,000 Robeson County absentee ballots, Director Fleming replied, “they need retraining.”
Who’s In Charge?
Meanwhile, we received this picture of Robeson Count BOE Chairperson, Tiffany Peguise-Powers, as she posed beside the Democrat Dan McCready, the Democrat who lost last November’s election by 905 votes.
While exploring the murky side of Robeson County BOE’s scanty records provided to the State BOE, we mentioned a Ms. Powers “raising hell” over the Board releasing documents to Judicial race runner-up, Jack Moody, but there’s more.
Friends of election integrity directed us to a Daily Haymaker report on Ms. Powers’ frequent donations to the McCready campaign, while she was on the Robeson Board of Elections.
From the Haymaker article:
FEC records show Peguise-Powers made FOUR contributions to Dan McCready’s campaign between June 2017 and September 2018. The largest shown was for $500 in June 2017. (Powers was serving on the county elections board at the time.)
There are specific state regulations against electioneering by board of elections members. You can’t do any of that for at least four years before joining the board of elections. (And you certainly can’t do it while serving on the board.)
At least four nominees for the state board — two from each party — were rejected because of them.
[Click here to see Chairperson Perguise-donation FEC donation record for the McCready election.]
Question to SBOE Director Strach: Did your puzzlement spur anybody in your agency to, oh . . . maybe depose Ms. Powers and Robeson County BOE staff about why the conveniently poor documentation of absentee ballot requests?
Question to the SBOE alone: Given her very partisan donation record, why is Ms. Powers still on the Robeson County Board of Elections?
To be continued . . .
If the Republican Party had competent leadership, they would have been like a bulldog with a bone pressing the Democrat ballot harvesting issue at every turn for the past months. Instead, they were Missing in Action. Lacks a whole heck of a lot, Woodhouse and Hayes. Both of you need to be GONE, and the sooner the better.
The feds are now getting in to the investigation of ballot harvesting. Maybe they will do the fair bi-partisan investigation that the SBOE failed so miserably at. If the Haymaker and VIP forwarded all of their research and reports on ballot harvesting in Bladen and Robeson Counties in both 2016 and 2018, maybe that would help point them in the right direction of what the SBOE deliberately overlooked. Of course, for obvious reasons, it would be necessary to see that both political appointees high up the food chain and careerists both got copies of the materials. The FBI investigation of the Hillary emails showed that careerists may very well play politics in these things.