A disputed congressional seat in North Carolina could remain vacant for months after incoming Democratic House leaders in Washington on Friday declared they would not seat the apparent Republican winner because of unresolved allegations of election fraud in that race.
Even before Democrats made that fresh vow on Friday afternoon, the chaotic fight for the Ninth District’s House seat had already plunged into deeper turmoil: North Carolina’s state elections board dissolved at noon on Friday under a court order, two weeks before it was to hold a public hearing to consider evidence of the fraud allegations.
“We have entered no man’s land,” said J. Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C.
Friday’s political drama came more than seven weeks after Mark Harris, the Republican nominee for Congress in the Ninth District, seemed to defeat Dan McCready, the Democratic candidate, by 905 votes in November. But Mr. Harris’s apparent victory was soon overshadowed by allegations that a contractor for his campaign engaged in illegal activity to compromise the election. According to witnesses and affidavits, the contractor, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., and people working for him collected absentee ballots in violation of state law.
The accusations led the State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement to refuse to certify Mr. Harris as the winner and to open an investigation that has so far involved more than 100 interviews and at least 182,000 pages of records. It also gave Democrats a powerful argument to keep Mr. Harris out of office, at least for now — a pledge they made unequivocally on Friday — under the House’s constitutional authority to be “the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” Democrats had been signaling such a plan for weeks.
But the direction of North Carolina’s investigation into the allegations faced new obstacles on Friday as the elections board dissolved, a court-ordered consequence of a long-running battle over partisan power in North Carolina that was separate from the election fraud investigation. Even with the demise of the board, state officials said the inquiry would continue at the staff level, even if a board was not yet in place to consider evidence and reach conclusions.
“The staff will continue to investigate the Ninth District irregularities and perform all other elections-related functions,” said Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the embattled panel.
The state board issued a new round of subpoenas in the hours before its dissolution. And in a letter on Friday, Joshua D. Malcolm, the Democrat who was chairman of the elections board, complained that Mr. Harris’s campaign had not been sufficiently responsive to a subpoena that was served weeks ago.
Mr. Malcolm said investigators had received 398 pages of campaign records — and believed there were about 140,000 other documents that could be of value to investigators but had not been made available.
“You are hereby requested to fully comply with the board’s subpoena so as to not further impact the agency’s ability to resolve the investigation,” Mr. Malcolm wrote in his letter to Mr. Harris’s campaign.
Mr. Harris has denied wrongdoing but acknowledged this month that he had directed the hiring of Mr. Dowless, a political operative from Bladen County who had previously been scrutinized by the authorities for possible election tampering. No one, including Mr. Dowless, has been charged in connection with this year’s allegations, and Mr. Dowless, who has declined to comment, rejected a request to meet with state investigators.
But plans for the January hearing, and the fate of the board, eventually ran headlong into a case that dealt with the constitutionality of the elections board’s design. On Thursday night, in a decision that stunned North Carolina Democrats and Republicans alike, a three-judge panel angrily rejected a bipartisan request to extend the life of the board temporarily.
The ruling left the board with less than 24 hours to exist, and plans for the Jan. 11 hearing uncertain. Some state officials said on Friday that the structure of recent legislation setting up the future elections board meant it could not begin operations until Jan. 31.
Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said Friday that he intended to name an interim board that would serve until the new law took effect. It was not immediately clear how quickly Mr. Cooper would act, but Republicans said that they would challenge such a move and would consider a boycott of the board.
The board, which said it received the motion at 10:15 a.m., took no action before its dissolution at noon.
But Mr. Malcolm, in his final minutes as elections board chairman, suggested the state would not hasten its inquiry.