Local media spin spreads false information about NC election fraud controversy

For the past couple of months, the residents of North Carolina's 9th Congressional District (which includes my home county of Robeson) have been left without a representative in Washington. After allegations of election fraud surfaced against Republican candidate Mark Harris, the State Board of Elections refused to certify his election. After a hearing on Monday, the Executive Director of the State Board of Elections found that Harris's hired operative, McCrae Dowless, knowingly engaged in fraudulent behavior and that Harris hired him despite knowing that he had done so on previous campaigns. Since it has not been definitively proven that Dowless's actions changed the results of the election, Harris currently holds a very narrow ~900 vote lead, Republicans are clinging to the hope that Harris would ultimately be seated in Congress.

Much as I did yesterday, I want to highlight some misleading rhetoric surrounding an issue. On February 15th, The Robesonian, the primary newspaper of record in Robeson County, one of two counties where Dowless operated, published an editorial that made a huge false equivalence. In this op-ed, they point to a local judicial race where the Democrat leads by 67 votes. They attempt to allege that the Democrats may have committed fraud by pouring lots of money into "get-out-the-vote" efforts. Anyone who has worked on, volunteered for, or even gotten lost and somehow wondered into a campaign office knows that that statement should amount to journalistic malpractice. 

Get out the vote campaigns focus on door knocking, making calls, and doing visibility in the local community in order to motivate people to get out and vote. These actions are are all completely legal. What Dowless did, actively falsifying ballots and ballot requests, is pretty clearly not. Further, regardless of how or why a person goes to vote, their decision in the booth is ultimately theirs. Unless a candidate is violating other laws such as paying you to vote for them, there is nothing illegal here. 

It is journalistic malpractice for the editorial board of a newspaper to falsely equate a legal and accepted campaign practice with a tactic that is against the law and deprives someone of their right to vote. If a new election is ultimately called, the people in the 9th District would be ill-served by this type of rhetoric coming from what are believed to be legitimate news sources.