dowless, a convicted felon, who was working for a firm hired by the republican candidate. allegedly this operative had something to doing with highly questionable absentee ballot activity. dowless personally turned in 592 of the 1,341 total absentee ballot requests in bladen county. and a set of 161 ballots obtained by cnn showed that nine people individually signed as witnesses on at least ten absentee ballots. many of those nine are loosely connected to dowless. usually the witness for an absentee ballot is the voter's family or friends and this cnn learned that more than 1,000 ballots in the race might have been destroyed. there are also allegations that republican operatives took