By Sam Levine |
Jens Lutz says the board received multiple forged requests for absentee ballots, including one on behalf of a dead person.
A former election official in Bladen County, North Carolina, has given state officials new evidence of election fraud in a congressional district under scrutiny.
In a sworn statement to the state elections board last week, Jens Lutz, the former vice chair of the Bladen County board of elections, said his office received “several” forged request forms for absentee ballots during the 2018 election ― including one on behalf of a dead person.
Lutz’s statement is significant because state investigators are probing irregularities with absentee ballots in the area. The congressional race in North Carolina’s 9th District is the last unresolved one in the country. Republican Mark Harris unofficially leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes, but state officials can order a new election if they find sufficient evidence the contest was tainted by fraud or irregularities.
In the affidavit, Lutz, who resigned from the Bladen County board of elections earlier this month, said officials received forged requests for absentee ballots. Some of the forged requests were made on behalf of relatives of board members, including Cynthia Shaw, the county’s director of elections. Lutz said that McCrae Dowless, a political operative and a person of interest in the investigation, had a close relationship with Shaw, who left the Bladen County board after the election.
“In the course of our supervisory duties, we discovered that several forged absentee ballot request forms were submitted for the 2018 general election, including one request form on behalf of a deceased person, another submitted on behalf of a relative of fellow Board member Bobby Ludlum, and another submitted on behalf of a relative of Ms. Shaw,” Lutz wrote in his affidavit, which was submitted to the state board by lawyers for the McCready campaign and made public Sunday evening.
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