Mark Harris now says 2018 election was stolen from him. Here are the facts | Opinion

Remember Mark Harris? The guy whose 2018 victory in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District was thrown out due to absentee ballot fraud?

He’s running for Congress again this year, and he claims that the election that somebody tried to steal for him was actually stolen from him.

For those who don’t remember: Harris appeared to win the 9th District election in 2018 by 905 votes. But it turned out that McCrae Dowless, a political operative hired by the Harris campaign, led an illegal ballot-harvesting scheme. A consulting firm hired by the Harris campaign had paid Dowless $130,000 for campaign work, though Harris denied having knowledge of any illegal activity and did not face any charges himself. The North Carolina State Board of Elections declined to certify the results, and a new election was ultimately ordered.

But there was nothing wrong with the 2018 election, Harris now says. He blames Democrats for preventing him from taking his rightful place in Congress.

“[In] 2020, Democrats stole the election from Donald Trump. The year before, they did it to me,” Harris said in a video announcing his candidacy in September.

In the video, Harris claimed the ballot-harvesting scandal was “manufactured” by Democrats, who “made up accusations, spread lies and used the attention to make themselves famous.” He repeated those allegations in a story recently published by The Assembly.

That’s absurd. There WAS some foul play happening in that election, but it was intended to work in his favor. If somebody affiliated with his campaign hadn’t illegally tampered with absentee ballots, then Harris might be a member of Congress right now. Never mind, too, that ordering an election do-over was a unanimous decision by a bipartisan elections board. And don’t forget this: Harris called for a new election himself.

Here’s what Harris told the Board of Elections while under oath in 2019: “It’s become clear to me that the public’s confidence in the 9th District’s general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted.”

John Harris, his son, also testified that he warned his father against hiring Dowless because he suspected his methods were illegal. John Harris provided copies of email exchanges with his father in which he warned that Dowless’ collection of absentee ballots may violate state law.

Is Harris saying that everyone, from the Board of Elections to his own son, was lying? Besides, there was enough evidence for a grand jury to indict Dowless and a number of his associates. Though Dowless died before trial, several of his associates have since pleaded guilty. Of course, the story that Harris tells doesn’t include those details.

It’s also worth pointing out that while Harris declined to run in the do-over election and therefore never made it to Congress, the winner of that election also was a Republican: Dan Bishop. Overturning the election didn’t produce a more beneficial outcome for Democrats.

There’s no telling which version of events Harris truly believes, but there’s a strong chance that his new narrative is simply a political strategy. After all, it’s the playbook for too many Republicans these days: when an election produces an outcome you don’t like, simply claim that it wasn’t legitimate, even if you lack any evidence to support that claim.

That playbook was drafted, of course, by none other than Donald Trump, who continues to lie about the 2020 election and has received very little pushback from his own party for doing so. Trump wants you to believe that his loss in 2020 was tainted by fraud, despite all of the evidence that says it wasn’t. Harris, on the other hand, wants you to believe the opposite: his 2018 victory wasn’t tainted by fraud, despite the fact that it clearly was. Still, the goal is the same: to foment anger and grievance by framing themselves as the victims of some Democratic conspiracy, sowing distrust in our institutions in the process.

Will Harris’s primary opponents let his falsehoods and revisionist history slide, the same way Trump’s primary opponents have failed to call out the threat he poses to democracy? We’ll see. Just like Trump’s lies, Harris’s new narrative that the 2018 election was stolen from him is almost laughable in its complete disregard for the truth. But lies like that are also dangerous, and they cannot go unchallenged.