Reporter says to expect Capitol Hill to take action on North Carolina’s 9th District

North Carolina local news reporter Joe Bruno on Monday said that there will be more action taken this month on Capitol Hill to address election fraud allegations in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. 

“House Democrats have been pretty clear that they are going to investigate the 9th District for themselves,” Bruno told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton on “Rising.” 

“Later this month, we’ll start to see action coming out of Capitol Hill, people starting to take a deeper look at the 9th District,” he continued. “The House has control over its own members, and if they don’t want to seat [Republican Mark] Harris, they won’t seat Harris, and Majority Leader [Steny] Hoyer has been pretty clear that at this point, Harris would not be seated.” 

Bruno’s comments come after a Politico report that the chairwoman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Elections, Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) said she met with other subcommittee chairs to discuss the Democratic response to the potential of a North Carolina court ordering the election be certified before a state investigation into the claims wraps up. 

Harris staffer, Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr., has been accused of carrying out an illegal absentee ballot-harvesting operation in two counties in North Carolina with the aim of swaying the absentee ballot vote in Harris’s favor.

“The House could vacate the seat, and we could have a new election, and if the House vacates the seat, that also triggers a new primary,” Bruno said. “Of course the state board of elections, whenever it does come back into play here, they could continue their investigation and order a new election as well.” 

“Republican lawmakers last month did change the law, so if the state board of elections orders a new election, there will be a new primary as well,” he said. 

— Julia Manchester


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