“McCrae Dowless, the man whose ‘get-out-the-vote’ activities are the center of the election fraud investigation in North Carolina, told a local political campaign volunteer that he was holding onto 800 absentee ballots,” according to a new affidavit obtained by NBC News.

“In the signed statement, Kenneth Simmons said that he met Dowless at a local Republican Party meeting in the small town of Dublin. Dublin is located in Bladen County, the epicenter of the election fraud investigation involving absentee ballots. During that interaction, Simmons wrote, he and his wife saw Dowless with a large number of absentee ballots ‘in his possession.’”

WSOC-TV found what “appears to be a targeted effort to illegally pick up ballots” in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district, “in which even the person picking them up had no idea whether those ballots were even delivered to the elections board.”

Consistently, the station “found the same people signing as witnesses for the people voting, which is very rare.”

The Raleigh News & Observer looks at data on mail-in ballots in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district, where there are allegations of improperly collecting mail-in ballots and voters receiving mail-in ballots they did not request.

• Across the 9th district, 24% of the requested mail-in ballots were unreturned. In Robeson County, 64% of mail-in ballots requested did not make it back to elections officials. In Bladen County, the figure was 40%.
• The unreturned ballots are disproportionately associated with minority voters. More than 40% of the ballots requested by African Americans and more than 60% of those requested by American Indians did not make it back to elections officials. For white voters, that figure was just 17%.

“The Democratic chairman of the state elections board in North Carolina resigned Saturday, saying he did not want his partisan views to undermine a widening investigation into alleged election fraud in the 9th Congressional District race,” the Washington Post reports.