Co-authors Nick Ochsner (left) and Michael Graff.
BOOKS
BLADEN COUNTY BLUES
Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner dig into the Ninth Congressional District scandal and unwind a complex tale of race, power, and politics in eastern North Carolina BY GREG LACOUR
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA Press will publish The Vote Collectors, by Charlotte journalists Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner, on Nov. 16. The surface story is familiar to anyone who paid even cursory attention to North Carolina politics in 2018 and ’19: The Rev. Mark Harris, then pastor at First Baptist Church in Charlotte, initially appeared to have won a close race against Democrat Dan McCready for the Ninth U.S. Congressional District seat—a key victory for Republicans in the 2018 “blue wave” midterms. But the State Board of Elections eventually ordered a new election after months of public revelations about an extensive absentee ballot-harvesting scheme. The operation was based in rural Bladen County and overseen by a roguish, chainsmoking election consultant and felon named McCrae Dowless. The new election, in September 2019, sent former Mecklenburg County commissioner and state senator Dan Bishop, a Republican, to Washington; Dowless faces state charges related to the scheme and could stand trial before the end of the year. In The Vote Collectors, that scandal— which made national headlines for months—is secondary to a more comprehensive examination of its historical, economic, and political antecedents in Bladen County and oft-forgotten eastern North Carolina. Graff, editor of Axios Charlotte and former editor of this magazine, and Ochsner, the chief investigative reporter at WBTV, lived in the area long before 2018; Ochsner grew up near Fayetteville. That familiarity helped the two develop a continuing relationship with Dowless as a source and contextualize the Ninth District scandal—it was just one episode in an old and ongoing Continued on page 16
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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // NOVEMBER 2021
LOGAN CYRUS
THE BUZZ
