Hi there, this is Heather W. in Lewisville, Colorado.

I'm getting ready to go meet my husband for date night. We're going axe throwing.

This podcast was recorded at...

Best of luck. It is, uh, his Friday, uh, February 22nd at 12-08 Eastern.

Please note, things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully not the number of fingers and toes attached to my body.

Oh no. They say axe throwing is actually pretty safe.

I don't know, but a lot of people do that while also drinking, which feels very unsafe to me.

Good point. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. It is 2019, but in terms of the elections we talk about, we've just skipped past and talked all about 2020 elections. However,

now we have a 2019 election to tell you about, and it is a big deal. Yesterday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections called a new contest in a congressional race that has been rocked by accusations of fraud.

I'm Scott Tetra, I cover Congress. I'm Kelsey Snell, I also cover Congress. I'm Miles Parks, I cover Voting.

Hey, Miles, you are in North Carolina. You've been there all week. It has only gotten crazier here. Yeah, and, uh, there is a whole lot of crazy to sift through,

uh, the election. I'm just talking with the fact that the Board of Elections called a new, a new contest, but let's just start back at the beginning. Kelsey, can you catch us up to speed on what this district was and going into election day why we were already paying attention to it?

Yeah, so this is a Republican district near Charlotte, which is a mate, one of the biggest cities in the state of North Carolina. And I was down in North Carolina in a neighboring district right before the election, talking to Republicans about just kind of politics in the state in general.

I'm not really worried about this race in particular, because they thought the Republican who Mark Harris was maybe too far to the right for a city that was changing dramatically.

And they thought there was a really good chance that Democrats could win this seat. And then they didn't. But but Harris, after election day has a slim lead about 900 votes. What happens next?

Is the state board of elections comes together to certify all the races in the state. They certify most of them and then we come to the ninth congressional district and they decide not to certify it.

They vote instead to open up an investigation into allegations of election fraud. So then over the last couple months, state board investigators have been interviewing witnesses hundreds of people, voters, people who say that they were involved in what is now coming out to be an action.

And then they come out to be an absentee ballot scheme, which seems to have been connected in some way to Republican Mark Harris's campaign.

So and this isn't just a general problem. It has to do with one specific Republican consultant. Can you walk us through what who he is, what he was doing and what the problem was?

And then his name is Leslie McRae Dallas. He goes by McRae. He has been involved in politics in a place called Bladen County, which is the eastern part of the ninth district for many years.

Mark Harris approached McRae Dallas because he had heard about this absentee ballot campaign that Dallas had been running for other candidates in previous elections.

Basically now, what it looks like is that McRae Dallas was paying people to collect ballots, which is illegal in North Carolina. And there are still a lot of questions about whether Dallas turned in all of the ballots he collected.

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