McCrae Dowless pleads guilty to financial crimes related to 2018 election fraud scandal
McCrae Dowless pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to two crimes stemming from the investigation into the absentee ballot fraud scheme he’s accused of running in Bladen County and other parts of southeastern North Carolina.
Neither of the charges dealt directly with the election fraud allegations, however. Instead, he pleaded guilty to two of the four charges he faced related to Social Security disability fraud, and prosecutors agreed to drop the other two charges.
There’s a separate state-level court case dealing with the election fraud accusations, led by Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman. That case is still underway and wasn’t affected by Dowless’ plea deal Monday.
Dowless entered Monday’s plea minutes before jury selection was about to begin in his trial in Greenville.
Dressed casually in a light blue, short-sleeve, button-down shirt, and accompanied by two federal public defenders, the 65-year-old GOP political operative spoke very little other than acknowledging to the judge that he was in fact guilty of the charges.
He and his attorneys declined to comment to The News & Observer outside the courthouse and again during an elevator ride.
Dowless also agreed Monday to pay back up to $14,000 to the government as restitution for the disability payments he fraudulently took, but he won’t know for two more months what other punishment he might face. Sentencing in his case was set for the week of Aug. 23.
The disability fraud charges came as part of an investigation into Dowless for allegedly running an absentee ballot scheme in which he and some assistants would collect people’s ballots and, in some cases, fraudulently sign them or even fill in votes for races that the voters had left blank, officials say.
The accusations against him led to the 2018 9th District congressional race, between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready, being redone without Harris.
Harris’s campaign hired a group called Red Dome Consulting, which in turn hired Dowless. Prosecutors said Monday that Dowless took — and tried to hide — more than $130,000 from Red Dome Group, even though he was also getting Social Security benefits after claiming to be too disabled to work.
Instead of depositing the checks into a bank account, Dowless cashed them to avoid detection. That allowed him to continue claiming he wasn’t working, so that he wouldn’t lose his disability checks — which ranged in value, up to $721 a month, the prosecution said.
Dowless said Monday he was in fact guilty and didn’t want to fight the charges, after Judge Terrence Boyle informed him he was about to waive his right to a trial and more.
“If you plead guilty, you give those rights up,” Boyle told Dowless. “Do you understand that?”
“Yes, your honor,” Dowless replied.
He pleaded guilty to a charge of theft of government property and defrauding the Social Security disability system. In exchange for that and his promise of restitution, prosecutors dropped charges of defrauding the Social Security retirement system, and making false statements.
Who is McCrae Dowless?
Dowless is a longtime fixture in the local politics in his home of Bladen County and the surrounding areas — a rural, impoverished part of the state between Fayetteville and Wilmington. Before he became a nationally known figure for the election fraud scandal in 2018, he had mostly worked in smaller races like for judges, sheriffs and state legislators, not for congressional candidates.
According to Wilmington-based news station WECT, Dowless worked for at least 21 politicians over the years. From 2008 to 2012 he worked for both Democrats and Republicans, WECT’s reporting showed, and since 2014 he has worked only for Republicans.
In the separate state-level case over election fraud charges in 2016 and 2018, Dowless is accused of paying a handful of local residents to drive around and collect people’s mail-in ballots — and then, if the voters left any races blank, to fill them in for the Republican candidates.
Most of the smaller races he was involved in did not draw the attention of investigators.
But in 2016, he was hired by a Republican newcomer who wanted to challenge then-Rep. Robert Pittenger, a Republican congressman since 2013. Pittenger lived in Charlotte but his district mostly covered more rural areas, stretching east along the South Carolina border and into Bladen County. The challenger who hired Dowless, Todd Johnson, came in last in that primary but won a large percentage of mail-in votes.
Johnson, now a state senator representing Union County in the General Assembly, told WRAL-TV in 2019 that he had no idea he won 98% of the mail-in vote in Bladen County after hiring Dowless. But the second-place finisher in that 2016 primary, Baptist preacher Mark Harris, did notice. He planned to run again in 2018 and hired Dowless for himself for that next race.
In a 2017 message turned over to investigators in 2019, Harris called Dowless “the guy whose absentee ballot project ... could have put me in the US House this term, had I known, and he had been helping us.”
After hiring Dowless, Harris narrowly beat Pittenger in the 2018 primary and then appeared headed to Congress after seeming to narrowly squeak out a win in the general election — as he predicted in that text message a year earlier. Unofficial results showed him ahead of Democratic opponent Dan McCready by 905 votes.
But state election officials became suspicious because of data from Bladen and Robeson counties and declined to certify the results of that election and a few others, even as they formalized the rest of the state’s election results.
An investigation ensued, followed by a four-day-long hearing in February 2019 by the N.C. Board of Elections that attracted media from all over the country, due to the rare and dramatic charges of a fixed election.
NC GOP officials at first strenuously defended Harris and criticized officials for not certifying his apparent win. But then, several days in, Harris’ son testified against him. A federal prosecutor, he said he warned his dad several times not to hire Dowless because it appeared he was potentially committing felonies.
That contradicted Harris’ own testimony that nobody had ever raised any red flags about Dowless. The next day, Harris suddenly did an about-face. He agreed that a new election should be held, and that he would not run in it.
Unlike Dowless, Harris was never charged with any crimes related to the alleged scheme.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published June 21, 2021 at 2:20 PM.
