THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The more so if the father is an evangelical preacher who has spent a lifetime delivering lies and deceit from his pulpit. Unfortunately, Republican candidate Mark Harris did not listen to his son John when John told him several times he was hiring a crook.

Contradicting his father’s previous denials, the son of Republican Mark Harris testified Wednesday that he told the candidate multiple times that he had concerns about the political operative hired to run an absentee ballot campaign in Bladen County.

The testimony from John Harris rebutted suggestions by Harris and his campaign that they’d seen no red flags about McCrae Dowless, who is now at the center of allegations into voting irregularities in the 9th Congressional District.

John Harris’ dramatic testimony came on the third day of a hearing by North Carolina’s State Board of Elections that could decide the nation’s last unresolved congressional race and has drawn national attention — and it left his father in tears.

“I love my dad and I love my mom,” John Harris said as his father cried. “I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle, OK? I think they made mistakes in this process, and they certainly did things differently than I would have done them.”

His parents did not know he was going to testify.

John Harris, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina, first raised concerns about ballot collection in Bladen County on the night of the Republican primary in 2016. Mark Harris finished second in that race, but third-place finisher Todd Johnson collected 221 of 226 mail-in absentee ballots in Bladen County in the race.

John Harris again raised concerns in April 2017, a day after Harris first met with Dowless about running an absentee ballot program in Bladen and Robeson counties. First in a phone call and then in subsequent emails, the younger Harris warned his father of both political and legal ramifications of hiring Dowless. Harris said his father told him McCrae assured them he operated legally.

“They believed what McCrae had assured them,” Harris testified. “I didn’t because I had done a deep dive into the numbers. ... I was right, unfortunately for all of us.”

As Shakespeare might have said, 'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have an honest child'. And when that child is an assistant U.S. attorney it is not too smart to believe the crook.