Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. (January 3, 1956 – April 24, 2022) was an American political operative and convicted fraudster from the state of North Carolina.
Dowless' actions were at the center of a fraud investigation following the 2018 North Carolina's 9th congressional district election.
[1] He was raised on a Columbus County, North Carolina, peanut farm until he was 10 years old, when his family moved to Bladenboro.
[4] Over the next couple of years, Dowless was paid thousands of dollars for getting out the vote efforts and, at times, for managing the campaigns of eastern North Carolina candidates Wesley Meredith, Al Leonard, Ken Waddell, and William Brisson.
[6][9] After noticing that Todd Johnson had won the absentee vote in Bladen County in 2016, Mark Harris had a consulting company, Red Dome Group (Lead Partner Andy Yates) hire Dowless to work on his 2018 campaign.
[13] In the general election against Democratic Party nominee Dan McCready, Harris was the unofficial winner by 905 votes.
Dowless was charged with multiple counts related to illegal ballot handling and obstructing justice in the 2016 and 2018 elections.
[22] On April 7, 2020, Dowless was indicted on federal charges "tangentially related to the ballot probe"[23] being investigated by the State Board of Elections.
A funeral was held at Center Road Baptist Church on April 30 in Bladen County and he was subsequently buried.
In his two-decade political career, Dowless had worked for candidates on both sides of the aisle, and in the end he was put out of both.